Day 23: Dublin

We certainly started off the Dublin trip with a bang. We're in a pretty big group as there's 11 of us total, so finding accommodations was a little troublesome. We were originally scheduled to be staying in a set of apartments on the south side of town. However, a few days before we left we got an email saying we had been 'upgraded' to a new set of apartments. We thought this was great, however it turned out to be pretty pretty bad. Our flight didn't end up getting us into Dublin until about 11:30 Thursday night. As we were taking the cab into Dublin, the driver mentioned in his 15 years of driving he had never driven anyone to where we were going. Warning sign #1.
When we pulled onto the street where we were saying, the driver started to mention that this wasn't exactly the best side of town, and that he wouldn't walk alone at night, or wonder off the main street. Warning sign #2. We finally got into our apartments, and they actually weren't too bad, besides being in the absolute slums of Dublin. To cap it all off, the property manager who was letting us into our apartments, Martin, had a HUGE attitude and was completely rude to everyone and was showing absolutely no respect to any of us.
At this point we had figured out that our 'upgrade' was nothing more than a dupe and that they had probably just run out of room in our original location and just moved us over to the rough side of town and hoped we wouldn't notice. We gave the booking agency a very angry phone call and they promised they would send someone over in the morning to work it all out. We survived the night, barely. Turns out someone was stabbed to death not too far from us. The booking agency sent Karen over, and she was genuinely sorry for the mistake, and realized her company had screwed up big time. We got a full refund for all four nights we were supposed to stay there, including the night before, plus 100 Euros extra. We immediately went straight to the Holiday Inn in the good part of town, and couldn't have been happier since.
The rest of Friday consisted of us walking around town and seeing the Temple Bar area. We spent most of the day going to pubs and seeing what Dublin had to offer. Today, Saturday, we plan on doing a bus tour and seeing more of Dublin's traditional landmarks. I'll bring my camera this time so I should have plenty of pictures.