A Trip to Dublin for the Price of an FS Ticket

Sitting in the flat one night after a bit too much of the old vino, my flatmate and I decided to go to Ireland what with having Irish roots and all. As I’m sure you know, Ryanair is the best thing ever, offering poor students like myself, the chance to make equally poor life decisions, and so, £30 later, I was booked up for a return trip to the Emerald Isle.  (Why do I do these things to myself?)

The next morning – the sun was rising, the birds were singing and my hangover was crippling.  We talked about it over lunch with the others and realised that we were literally going on holiday to another country for less than you’d pay for a ball. With arguably the biggest night in the St Andrews calendar later today – FS – it gave us an idea.  Would it be possible to take a city break away for less than the price of an FS ticket?

It was 3:30pm and I couldn’t find my passport.  My flatmate hadn’t printed off her boarding pass and our bus to the airport left in 15 minutes.   If we missed it, we would be waving goodbye to our weekend away in Dublin. Hurtling down Queen’s Gardens saw the less-than glamorous start to our mission: spend a weekend in Dublin for less than £70. The bus from St Andrews to Edinburgh airport was £8.50 for a single each way and the Dublin airport bus to the centre a measly €10 (£8) return in comparison.  We had managed to beg/bribe a friend of a friend to put us up for the weekend and after arriving at his house it was off to the corner shop for the necessities.  A bottle of what may as well have been paint stripper and some wine for our kind host set us back a further £14, leaving us a grand total of £1 to survive in the world’s 34^th most expensive city for two nights.  Easily done.

When in Ireland, drinking is an essential so we pre-drank like people have never pre-drank before and hit the town.  With €3 entry and an obligatory pint of Guinness at our chosen club, the budget was taking a pounding.   The next morning we aimed to take in all of Dublin’s finest (read: free) sites: we saw the Book of Kells, wandered round the art gallery, ambled through Trinity – all that good stuff.  Come evening, we did the same as the previous night, until it was time to leave the club at closing and head home to get the bus straight for our 4am flight – perhaps one of the most traumatic travelling experiences of my life.  We arrived in St Andrews a few hours later feeling like shit incarnate but having had an incredible weekend.

I may have ignored the chips I drunkenly bought (don’t pretend you don’t do the same with last night’s Dervish) and glossed over a few other non-essential purchases (here’s looking at you, enormous book on the life and works of Frida Kahlo), but we did pretty much manage it.  It is possible to have a holiday in another country for less than the price of another night of drunken debauchery in the tent on Lower College Lawn.

To paraphrase Ke$ha, goddess of fun, “why not have a weekend you’ll never forget rather than have a night you won’t remember?”

Image courtesy of  saatchigallery.com