(Ireland trip) Ennis

Here comes separate post no. 2!

From Dublin (Heuston, to be precise), we went to Ennis. I already mentioned that nobody seems to know it. I didn't know it either before I started planning this trip. While the planning was in progress, I realised there were basically two places from which you were able to go to the Cliffs of Moher, Galway and Ennis. Since we had already been to Galway during the last semester, I decided on Ennis. Of course, that was when we didn't know about the bus strike ... But anyway, we managed to go to the cliffs (as I told you, wait for the separate post ;-)). And before we did so, we had time to explore a bit of the town of Ennis.
Now you still don't know about Ennis, do you? But don't worry, I have the obligatory map for you:

So Ennis is a town in the west of Ireland. Its population, which I finally looked up, is something around 20000. You might think that's not really big, but believe me, for Ireland it is kind of big ... It's for sure bigger than Maynooth (there's a reason why it is called university town).

If you look at the "urban" (ahem) area instead of the town only, Ennis has around 25000 inhabitants - which actually makes it the 11th biggest urban area of the Republic of Ireland, according to this Wikipedia article. Let me summarise: What the actual fuck?!

Whatever. The purpose of this post is not expressing wonder about the small number of people in Ireland - especially in comparison to the big number of cows & sheep. It's about the in fact not so small town Ennis.
First, we went from the train station to our hostel. This took some time, because we had to pass the town centre with O'Connell Street and O'Connell monument (maybe Ennis should better be called Little Dublin xD) while it was raining all the time. But then we finally spotted it - the nicest hostel ever seen!

I wasn't being ironic about the nice hostel. :-P

I basically booked it because it was the only hostel that showed up when I was searching for hostels in Ennis on Hostelworld, but it's actually top rated there. And it got even better: since we came to Ennis off-season, there were only few people in the hostel. So when we checked in, the receptionist offered us a private ensuite room instead of the 8 bed dorm I had booked. For the same price!
So I guess we had the best night of all there - especially Michael, since he got the kingsize bed! ;-)
In order to not make anyone go green with envy, I didn't take any pictures of the room with the kingsize bed,the kingsize bathroom, or the piece of cake we got together with a short letter of welcome. Only of the cute piece of art hanging on the wall:

Andy Warhol ducks ...?

After checking out this amazing place, we went to Aldi to get something to eat. Aldi in Ennis actually has better opening hours than Aldi in Maynooth - which is just next to the university! Then we had dinner in the hostel and left the hostel again to go to a pub called Cruises. And, of course, it was nicer than all four pubs in Maynooth ... and there was proper Irish live music at the beginning!

And now, all the pictures of Ennis town - I just didn't want to ruin the text above by inserting pictures between each half-sentence:

River Fergus just next to the hostel.

A local church (couldn't find out the name) on the way to Aldi.

The town centre in the rain.

In Cruises ...

... a really atmospheric pub ...

... with live music!

And a place we didn't go to, but I had to take pictures of it anyway, just because it was so impressing: YOLO, a bar or something with an interesting name and "cute" decoration.

Even more impressive at night.

Oh, and speaking of something being impressive: let me just post another picture of our hostel:

Also nice at night. :-)

And to end this post with: here's a picture I took during breakfast at the hostel. In the dining room, there was a wall full of expressions and sayings translated from English into Irish, including instructions how to pronounce it. I liked this one best: