My Big Adventure Across Europe

So I know I haven't updated in a while, but I've been pretty busy traveling. At the moment, I'm on a 7 hour ferry from Santorini, back to Athens, and ran out of books to read. Therefore, I figured I'd update. The last trip I updated on was Morocco, which was the adventure of  lifetime, to say the least. However, I've seen a lot since then. After Morocco was finals, which although pretty sucky, were not nearly as bad as they would've been in the US. I passed all my classes (yay!) and then started my adventure with Katie. First stop, Ireland.  So we started off by flying into Belfast, which is in Northern Ireland. We thought maybe we could rent a car to drive down to Dublin, but of course, neither of us knew that Ireland is split in 2, and we'd have to pay a crossing international borders fee to do it. Good thing we asked. Belfast was nice, but kind of boring. We wandered around, saw some churches and pretty things, but overall, it wasn't one of my favorite places. Apparently though, it's an up and coming place. We walked to the Titanic shipyards, which were just big construction sights with little signs you could read, and to a market, which was pretty cool. My favorite was the botanical gardens, where I spent hours taking pictures and reading. That was nice.  Afterwards, we took a bus to Dublin. That place I really enjoyed.  It's a small enough city where you can get everywhere walking, and the people are great. We spent our first day there doing the sights, including going to the Guiness Factory. It was fun and interactive, and you end up getting a glass of the stuff at the end (I think it tasted like coffee breath, but that's just me... everyone just responded with "Yeah, it's an aquired taste). Then that night, because it was a Saturday night, we went to the Temple Bar area. It's a pretty touristy bar area, so everything is really expensive, and I don't think locals actually go there, but we had fun. We met some guys from England who bought us drinks and were hilarious. Then we moved onto another bar, where I practiced my Spanish with some Rugby players from Santander. We ended the night with the best loaded french fries of my life. The next day, we decided to do a tour of the countryside, which was full of old people, but we really enjoyed. Our bus driver/tour guide was great and sung songs throughout the ride, while providing us with those really corny jokes about the differenced between men and women. We ended up at these big Gardens, that were great for taking pictures and wandering through. That took up most of the day, and then we took a nap. We thought we'd tour a bar crawl that night, but we ended up being the only ones that went, plus our guide. He ended up going with us to 2 bars, and just hanging out. Not exactly the most successful bar crawl, but it was fun nonetheless.  Next stop, Lisbon, Portugal.  Portugal was really pretty, but we weren't actually there that long. The hostel was absolutely great. It was small, on one floor, clean, and didn't have many people staying there. It felt like an apartment. We spent the first day there doing more touristy stuff, the churches and the castle. The whole city is on a giant hill, so we spent most our time going uphill trying to find things. It was all pretty stuff, but you can only see so many churches in your life, before you lose interest.  We went out to a nice dinner and I got to watch a movie alone in the living room, curled up on the couch. The second day we were there (22nd), we decided to go to the beach. We took a train for about an hour to a nearby beach city, and spent the day laying and reading (the water was too cold). It was nice and relaxing after all the moving around we'd been doing. We spent the night in the hostel and cooked ourselves a healthy dinner for once.x The 23rd was Dia de San Jordi, so we flew back to Barcelona.