Praha

I finally got my act together and have the first round of pictures from my Christmas trip.

This is actually in Dublin in front of the post office on O'Connell Street.

Grafton Street all decked out for Christmas.

Snow somewhere in Germany (on our way to Frankfurt).

My delicious lunch in the Frankfurt airport! "Pork schnitzel with beer sauce, onions and bacon, served with french fries"

Had to try some beer. This one was Bitburger.

We got popcorn from the popcorn machine. We were here for 9 hours, we had to find stuff to do.


The National Museum in Prague!
This is an old street car that the converted into a cafe. We got coffee here one afternoon.

We sampled the food at the Christmas market in the Old Town Square.

The market.

That's the Praha caste up at the top of the hill.

The Rudolfinum.

The John Lennon Wall, the only legal place for graffiti in the city.


The view of Prague while walking up to the castle.

The changing of the guard at the castle.

The cathedral inside of the castle.


You cant see it well in this picture, but the view was absolutely incredible.

Trdelník, this Christmasy thing they sold everywhere. This kind was dough rolled in sugar, vanilla, toffee, almond, and nuts.

This is the back garden/courtyard at our hostel.

And this was our room/cottage.

This is a statue in a mall that was made by this one artist that has his work all over the city.


Another Christmas market.

The best dinner of the trip! This was at the Olympia, the restaurant that dad and I ate at when we were there. This dish was "Moravian 'Sparrows' Pieces of pork with garlic and onion, bread and bacon dumplings, red and white cabbage." It's the same dish that I got last time and I still loved it. Amanda got the same thing and talked about it the rest of our trip. It was definitely worth the trek across the river in the rain that night.

The local beer: Pilsner.


Yeah...I had a bit of a shoe disaster in Praha. My rain boots didnt hold up so well...

The Astronomical Clock.

Trying hot wine.

The Old Town Square market at night.

On our last morning when we were just about to leave it started snowing! You cant see it in this picture, but it was awesome :)

So there you go! Pictures from the first leg of my trip. Up next will be Vienna, though I dont know how soon that will be.

We're going to Malta this week and I'm super excited for it, so I'm sure I'll be even more behind on posting after that.

Cork...ish

Finally I got some pictures of Cork together. Really, there aren't that many of the city itself (sorry!), but there are some that we've taken on random nights out (or in) and some of the new people this semester.

This is inside of the English Market in the fish section.

One of the crazy fish you can buy.

This was actually way at the beginning of the year at a place called An Brog (translation: the shoe). We used to go there a fair bit, but we dont really like it anymore.

At Sober Lane on Saturday nights they have a balloon animal guy so we all got hats one night.

This was my first Irish rainbow that I saw out of my window one day.

The spanish kids threw a hippie party a while back.

Laura drew this. It's our "family portrait" that was up in the kitchen for over a month.

We went to the Beamish factory while we had some friends visiting. We were lucky because they are being closed down in March (which is really sad because it is currently the oldest brewery in Ireland) so they aren't giving any more tours.

They taught you how to pour your own pint.

This was mine :)

This is Laura and Tom. Tom was a friend of one of our friends (Andrew), who visited for about 4 days and hung out with us a lot while Andrew was in class.

Kelly outside of Saville around Christmastime.

Oliver Plunkett Street.

We thought that it was juice...really it's this weird eco-friendly Australian wine.

You cant see how amazing this scene was in this picture, but this is up this huge hill at the music department looking out over the city.

These are two of our new friends, Steph (left) and Alex (right).

Laura and Kelly with Joe and Steph. Kelly and Joe are kind of dating. They were set up by our friend from last semester, Matt, who lived with Joe back home last year.

Jenna's cousin was visiting this past week so we went to dinner one night and the wait was really long (30 minutes...which is crazy long over here) so to make up for it they decorated our table like we were having a birthday party and gave us all hats!


This is Bethen, Jenna's cousin.

A few nights ago the river was CRAZY high. It almost ended up covering the bridge. This is the closest bridge to my flat that can technically be seen from our living room. The building on the other side is the Cork College of Commerce.

Kelly and Liam playing Wii. Kelly is wearing the crown she bought for her "European" birthday (because the date is written backwards here and her licence has it written 09/01/88, which is January 9 to Europeans) since she didnt get to celebrate her actual birthday over here.

I dont actually remember the name of the girl on the left, but the one in the middle is Meg, another new person this semester.

So, those are pretty much all of the pictures I have of Cork. Pretty sad, I know, but I'm sure i'll get more eventually.

In other news i'm going to be travelling once again in a few weeks! We are going to Malta Feb 5-7! We are all soooo excited. It's supposed to be like one big outdoor museum. And the weather will actually be warm (50s and 60s!!!) so we'll be busting out the bathing suits and relaxing in the jacuzzi on the roof of our hotel :) The hotel is amazing (if you want to check it out, here is a link to a video about it: http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=lm45RPQ6ZTs ) and the best part is that we are each only paying 11E for 2 nights (cant beat 5.50E a night!). We definitely cant wait!

I've got some pics sorted out from my big trip so if the internet cooperates I'll be posting some of those in the next few days!