Christmas market & cinema (29.11.)

Yeah, so I'm done with my last essays for Maynooth and have already moved back to Mannheim. Now I can finally write another blog post. :-D

At the weekend of the first advent, we wanted to go to a Christmas market. The original plan was to go to Waterford because there was some fancy Christmas festival. It would have been cool to go there - but... when we checked out public transport, we found out that it would have taken us wayyy to long. Not that Waterford is so incredibly far away (in fact, nothing is very far away on this island), it's just the standard problem: public transport...
Anyway, then we decided to just go to Dublin again. Way easier, faster, cheaper - and there was a Christmas market as well.
But since this is Ireland, going to the Christmas market started a bit differently than we had expected. To go there, you first had to queue! xD The Christmas market was in a separated area, and there was actually security personnel telling you where to queue. Because the signs saying "queue this way" were not big enough or something like this... ^^

But at least there was a choir performing Christmas songs right next to the queue:

Waiting to be allowed to pass the guys in yellow to go into the restricted area. xD

I didn't really get at the beginning why they were making such a fuss about a Christmas market. In Germany, you just go there. The explanation was (again): Irish!! Okay, it was the first time that they had organised a Christmas market in this street, so it was so be expected that it wouldn't be the most structured and considered matter of all time. Furthermore, it was an Irish Christmas market, Doesn't make organisation any better... Yeah, and then there was the alcohol problem. Normally, it's not allowed to drink alcohol in public in Ireland. But this was a f...ing Christmas market, so - of course - there was mulled wine. Otherwise it wouldn't have been a proper Christmas market (cf. improper Christmas markets in Sweden, as I was told by a friend who spent her Erasmus semester there ^^). To make drinking on a Christmas market possible, they obviously had to limit the area where alcohol was consumed. There were even signs saying stuff like, "no consuming of alcohol behind this point". xD

Except for the alcohol business, it was pretty much a small normal Christmas market. Nice, but nothing special.

Needless to say: we didn't need the whole day to check out the Christmas market. So we strolled through the city for some time, got something to eat, ... Actually I didn't take any pictures of the noodle bar we went to. But of the Christmas decoration (decoration issues again...):

Not the best pictures ever though... The nice pictures of the Christmas decoration in Dublin (Petra took them, not me) can be found in the apology post, by the way.

Yeah, and somewhere in between all the decoration picture taking, we also went to the cinema to watch the most recent part of the Hunger Games, Mockingjay 1. Of course, we had to take a selfie first to properly document this event (no cinema in Maynooth, remember? ^^)

Selfie on a bridge.

And since it's not possible to spot either the bridge or anything of the Liffey, here is what the view looked like there: