This will be the last post I write about my time in Dublin. This is the one where I tell you about everything that went wrong while I was there: the bloopers, if you will. They will appear in chronological order, more or less. The main reason for this is that I made a list of bloopers in my phone and updated it while I was there.

The list will exist of both things I could have prevented and things that weren’t my fault at all. Warning: you might feel the need to smack me in the face while reading this. I urge you not to do that. After all, errare humanum est. To err is human. Or, as Hannah Montana put it so eloquently, nobody’s perfect.

There are probably more of these than you’d expect there to be in a five-day trip. This should tell you something about who I am as a person. In case you couldn’t tell, I’m the kind of person that makes a lot of mistakes.

Let’s get this show on the road!

I had too much baggage

Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. You see, I flew with Ryanair, so I wasn’t allowed to bring a lot of baggage. Without paying extra, I could bring one 15 kg bag that fit in the standard hand baggage measurements. The bag I wanted to bring didn’t fit, so I had to pay extra for another bag that they would transport in the cargo hold.

In hindsight, I would have been better off cramming my baggage in a smaller bag, so that I wouldn’t have had to pay extra. That’s just something to keep in consideration for my future trips, I guess.

I scheduled everything wrong

Again, I’ll have to put this in perspective. I didn’t actually schedule everything wrong. It’s just that when I was planning my trip, I had every day planned down to the hour (more or less). For some reason that I can’t remember now, I decided to switch two days around, which caused some problems. For example, I had originally planned to go to Liberty Market on Saturday, but because I had switched the days around, I had to go on Monday.

At the time, I didn’t realize that this little switcharoo would mean that the market wouldn’t actually be open and I’d be standing in the rain, staring at the entrance, figuring out what I could have done wrong.

I forgot to send myself the schedule

Yeah. I had made my travel plans on my laptop. They were neatly organized in a Word document, with addresses of key elements of my tour and all. But, see, I didn’t really fancy carrying around my laptop just to look at the schedule all the time.

Upon arriving at Dublin Airport, I found out that I had no way of accessing the schedule on my phone, which I would in fact be carrying with me. I opened up my laptop, but of course, the airport wifi decided not to work at the time. This meant that I had to wait until I got to the hostel in order to send it to myself, so that I could access it on my phone.

(That did work, luckily.)

I didn’t have a ticket for Kilmainham Gaol

You should know, this jail was one of the things I was most looking forward to. So you can imagine the shock I got when I was standing at the reception of said jail, realizing I hadn’t booked a ticket and all tours until that afternoon had been sold out.

As it turned out, there was actually an extra highlight tour being organized, so I had to rush to reception in order to get a ticket for that. Luckily, I made it.

If you want to read the full story – and I highly recommend you do – you can check it out here.

My travel adapter was stolen

Being a smart cookie, I had brought along a travel adapter from home. This was necessary, because the electricity sockets are different in Ireland than they are in Belgium. One of my roommates from Colombia hadn’t been that smart. She asked me to borrow my adapter, which I gave to her because I’m a decent human being. I shouldn’t have.

When I got back to the hostel from a day of exploring the city, my charger was returned neatly to my bed, but my adapter wasn’t. My best guess is that she took it with her to Colombia. I had to buy a new one at reception, which I thought would have been a couple of euros saved by taking an adapter from home. I guess not.

Again, for the full story, feel free to read this post. Yes, this happened on the same day as my forgot-to-book ticket to Kilmainham. Yes, I was sad.

I had to wait at a bar for 15 minutes

This was the third (and last) major disaster of day three.

I realize this might not sound that bad to some people, but hear me out. This was on the day that I was having dinner at the oldest pub of Ireland, the Brazen Head. While I was still in Belgium, I had looked up their website. I couldn’t find any way of making a reservation on there, so I figured it wouldn’t be necessary. (If you can find it, please let me know.)

I was wrong. The night I went was apparently a night of live music. This meant that there were a buttload of people there, which in turn made it quite difficult to find a place to eat. A waitress referred me to the bar, where I could wait until a table cleared up.

Which I did. I was there about fifteen minutes when that kind of happened. There was a table of four, already being shared by two couples who didn’t know each other. One of the couples was done eating, so they went off. I took my chance and sat down at their place. And that is the story of how I had dinner in Dublin next to a couple from Catalonia.

Airport security took my deodorant

For people who travel a lot, this is (understandably) a facepalm-worthy mistake. I know, I should have thought about transferring my deodorant spray bottle from my hand baggage to my checked baggage. I actually did, on my first flight. But somehow, on the way back, I was completely oblivious to the fact that liquids aren’t allowed in an airplane.

The reason this upset me is because it was a new bottle of deodorant. It may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but for a student on a budget like me, things like that can hurt. Both physically and emotionally :(.

Conclusion

As this is the last post I’ll be writing about my time in Dublin, I deem it appropriate to say something about how I felt about everything that happened and what this trip meant to me.

Although this post may make you feel like there were more things that went wrong than right, I would like to reassure you. I had the time of my life. These small setbacks were nothing compared to the experiences I had, new things I went through and people I met. If I could do it all again, I wouldn’t hesitate to.

This trip has definitely sparked my interest for solo travel. I fully intend to continue exploring the world, one place at a time, by myself. I have yet to find myself on my travels, so my next trip will probably be something more adventurous, like Thailand.

All in all, traveling to Dublin alone was a great decision, and I’m happy I made it. It motivated me to travel more in the future, and travel by myself in particular. All in all, it’s a decision I’m proud of and it’s something to tell my grandchildren about when I’m sitting on my front porch in a rocking chair.

(Sorry there weren’t any pictures in this post; I literally had no idea what to put there, as I didn’t really take pictures of the things I did wrong.)

Thanks for reading!

-S