Ireland, Germany & The Netherlands

A lot has happened since my last post.. my blog-neglect has begun.

We arrived in Ireland via Ferry from Strunraer using a second free day on our rail passes. So from the original 4 days of train travel, we've used 6 so far, and have 1 left for a christmas day trip.
It was dark when we docked in Belfast, so we found a hostel and then a pub. There is so much construction in Ireland right now, probably the season. The next morning we wandered around town for a few hours, then took a two hour train ride to Dublin, followed by a 4 hour bus ride to Galway. We met up with Robyn's sister Ceiliegh, and finally unloaded the extra duffle bag. She is a long term residence in a hostel near city center and was able to set us up with a room for a few nights. It was a nice place, almost clean and very friendly. We took a bus tour to the Cliffs of Moher. It was probably not worth the cost, but by some twist of fate I was forced to chug 2 Guinesses for lunch. We did a pub crawl that night, that was fun.
We hit Dublin next, and found a hostel on the internet that seemed good (good ratings, good reviews, etc), we got there and paid 2 nights down. Then found out it was the dirtiest, most dangerous hole, filled with depressed, out of work eastern europeans.. and a subway that passes overhead every 15 mins all night. At 2:00am, 2 thieves wandered into our room looking for easy targets, luckly I wasn't sleeping. We stayed the first night, then decided to cut our losses and move to a better place.
We later found out that the reason it had such good reviews is because they put a fake sign above their door with the name of a better hostel. Assholes

Dublin wasn't too impressive. We visited the Irish National Gallery to look at some old art, then the Irish Modern art museum to look at some new art. We found the Guiness Brewary, but the whole neighborehood stunk like rotten beer, and my hangover from the previous nights pub crawl flared up. Overall, it seemed very depressed, the recession hit them hard I think.

I booked a plane ticket to Dusseldorf for 15$, incredible. Ryanair, its the cheapest way to travel. Germany was a bit tricky, I don't speak any german, and they don't speak much english. We got by though. Skipped over Dusseldorf and headed straight for Cologne. Cologne didn't have a single room available due to a massive model train convention.. naturally. We learned a lesson about booking rooms ahead of time. Actually there was one room available, and a nice one at a decent price, probably the last one in the entire city. Cologne had some amazing architechture, I took lots of photos.

We caught a train to Amsterdam the next day. Amsterdam is fun. We stayed at a small town outside of the city called Noordwijk, so were on the shuttle out of town before the night life really started. Even during the day it was cool, the night life must be insane. I'll definately have to go back at some point.

More to Follow.