We finally had some time yesterday to tour around Dublin (or Dooblin as the locals call it). Here is a run down of some of the things we saw:
St Stephens Green – a park with an arch.
National Museum – this was broken up into two locations. One location had displays on viking and midieval Ireland and the other is called Collins Barracks. Yep, you guessed it – these are barracks. The barracks had a very good exhibit on the military history of Ireland.
National Gallery – I had to go check out the Spanish art. They had a good main gallery and a special exhibit of watercolors.
Book of Kells – an excellent exhibit explaining and showing off these books (books of the 4 gospels written in latin dating back to 800AD). The location, at Trinity College, has a room called the Long Room with 200,000 of the oldest books owned by the college. Sounds boring but it was quite amazing!
Walk down O Connell Street – widest street in Ireland.
Lunch at Romano Ristorante – homemade noodles.
We walked up to Kilmainham Gaol (a prison) but it had already closed.
Today we plan to visit St Patricks Cathedral, Christ Church, and Dublin Castle – all very close to where we are staying.
We also visited The Stag’s Head pub – old Irish pub with a respectable writeup in our guide books. They had live Irish music. We also stopped off at The Temple Bar – big tourist bar but kind have to go there. They do not play traditional Irish music – rather they were playing pop 80s music. Not the most enjoyable place.
The other night we went out with some work friends to Nash’s Pub located near the office. A decent place – low key – just the way I like it.
I’m definitely ready to leave though…miss the family! We tried to move our flight in a day from Sunday to Saturday, but our airfare required a Saturday night stay otherwise we would have to pay over $1100 (which is more than our fare now). Whatever!