Galway

Galway is by far my favorite place I’ve been in Ireland. And here’s why.

1. Cliffs like no other  

Galway could have nothing else except this one thing, and I would still say it was my favorite place in Ireland. 

The Cliffs of Moher are the Grand Canyon of Ireland. There I said it. You can’t come to Ireland and not see them. They are so breathtakingly beautiful I don’t have the words to describe them, but I can tell you I would have been quite content spending all day here. 

They are so beautiful in fact I don’t even want to even write about them anymore. I just want you guys to appreciate as much of the beauty as these measly pictures were able to capture. 

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Excuse all the pictures of me, but this is my blog. 

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2. The shops!

Galway has the cutest shopping I’ve encountered in all of Ireland. It’s not nearly as big or overwhelming as Dublin, which makes for the perfect shopping experience. There were bookstores, clothing stores, jewelry stores and more.

In addition to being able to go shopping at several name brand stores such as Tommy Hilfiger, Galway also has a large number of local stores with trinkets and sheep plush toys that you can only find there. 

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Sadly, I was not able to do as much sightseeing in Galway as I would have liked because the day we spent there the lovely Storm Jorge hit and just about blew us out of the town. A lot of the shops my roommate and I wanted to check out the next day were closed. 😦  

Nevertheless, the storm did blow us into a lovely tea shop called Cupán Tae for shelter. It was probably the most “Instagrammable” place I’ve ever been to. 

3. The pubs 

The pub scene in Galway was one of my favorites I’ve encountered. In addition to serving food, the few we went to had wonderful live music. That was easily my favorite part. 

The two we spent the most time at were The Skeff and The King’s Head.

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I know there is a famous pub in Galway as well where the music video Galway Girls was shot, but it was just a little bit too far away for us to walk to. If you love Ed Sheeran, though, it might be worth checking out.

I didn’t take any pictures of them because, well, I wasn’t in exactly the blogging mood at the time I went. 🙂 Here’s a few I found online, though. 

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Supermacs also has a great cheeseburger if you go to said bars and are in need of a hangover cure the next morning.

Lastly, a few logistical things. 

I took this trip with another group from school, which means we also had a magical bus pick us up and drop us off just like the Glendalough trip. While this trip should only take about two hours and 15 minutes from Dublin, it rather unfortunately took us about double that with all the unnecessary stops we made. I may or may not have wanted to strangle some people by the time we finally got home.

It takes about an hour and a half to get from the Cliffs of Moher to the town Galway. Here’s a map to give you some perspective on where everything is. 

We stayed at a hostel in Galway for one night, but because that was my first time staying in a hostel I don’t have much to compare the experience to. My roommate (who has stayed in other ones) told me Kinlay Hostel was much larger than most hostels. 

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They served quite the assortment of bread in the morning for breakfast. Yes, you read that right they mostly just had bread – hence, why I went and got a cheeseburger at 11 a.m.

Galway was absolutely lovely, and I most definitely will make another trip back there.