Student Bloggers

This weekend I attended a homestay in Gorey, Ireland. I stayed in a house about a ten minute walk from the town centre of small shops and restaurants. Gorey is a beautiful, teeny town located about an hour and a half from Dublin. The bus arrived in Gorey and we were quickly orientated about the best restaurants, shopping, and pubs in the community, before being taken to our homes for the evening. I was excited to hit the town and meet local townspeople that night, because we were told that almost everyone goes out to the pubs to socialize on Fridays and Saturdays.

Most of our group went out at around 8:00pm on Friday night to grab a drink and soak in the atmosphere of the historic pubs. We got into a conversation with a lovely couple and their coworker who had lived in Gorey almost their whole lives. They were so lively, and we exchanged stories of school, work, and where we were from. Tom, whose wife was back at home with his 15 month old, showed us pictures of his adorable son, Tom. Jim and his girlfriend bought us all drinks – and we were slightly worried when we thought we had gotten into a “round” of 8 people – though we figured out pretty quickly that he had kindly just bought them for us.

The “rounds” system is the unspoken rule of each person buying a drink for everyone in the group for your round; we were told at orientation to be wary of accepting a drink since you may be entering a round. It is very rude to exit the round without purchasing your round for everyone, especially if you’ve had multiple drinks bought for you. As you can imagine, a round of 8 people would mean 8 drinks, and none of us wanted to have that much alcohol for one night! Luckily, he was just extending his welcome to us, and we didn’t continue with a round.

I enjoyed people-watching at McGovern’s, because the age range was the largest I’ve ever seen. Girls in shimmery, fun dresses sat chatting one table away from a group of retirees, watching the horse races. They had a live band and everyone was enjoying the huge range of songs. Without us knowing, the local band pulled out a Kings of Leon song, “for the Americans in town.” After a long night of chatting at McGovern’s, my roommate and I headed in for the night, so we’d be fully rested for adventuring on Saturday.

We had a lovely breakfast of eggs and toast on Saturday morning, courtesy of our host aunt. She then dropped us off in the centre of town so we could shop and find out if Katie Daly’s actually did have the best food in town (I can attest that my Panini was phenomenal – see the pic above). After shopping around and filling up our stomachs, it was off to the coastal Courtown, which was about a 7 minute car ride. We stopped by the Seal Sanctuary and listened to a presentation about saving both Grey and Common seals in Ireland. We then ran down to the beach in our swimsuits (just kidding – we were completely bundled up against the chilly coastal wind). Before freezing our toes off, we stopped in a local pub for an Irish coffee and headed home for dinner. That evening, we headed over to French’s to admire the atmosphere of the oldest pub in town. It was built in 1775 so they joked that the cobwebs had become structural features for the pub, so you shouldn’t clean them!

I thoroughly enjoyed spending the weekend out of the big city. It was refreshing to experience the range of young and old intermixing to chat for the evening. My Instagram will have plenty queued for the upcoming weeks after taking a million pictures of the shore on Saturday. Perfect weekends of relaxing must always come to an end, however … so it’s time to hit the books again. I’ll see ya in the library!