Dublin trip
Note: I was recently whisked away for a weekend trip to Dublin with my girlfriend. What follows is my summary of the trip, which was originally written for a private audience but — following their suggestion — opened up to the reader(s) of arbitrary constant
Ireland was great. I will say that is not much of a city for pedestrians, since the cars are relentless (more so than London) and the pedestrian crossings require a time of about 10.5 seconds for the 100m to get across them whilst they're on green. There was also something weird going on with the button you needed to press in order to cross. Sometimes they looked like English pedestrian crossings and other times they looked a bit French. Plus there was this weird clacking noise they made which told you it was time to cross. As I say, not a city for pedestrians.
Had a chance to visit Trinity College, which was just like Oxford but with an accent. Beautiful old buildings there and also a classy modern building, too.
Visited the Ireland National Gallery as well. One half is full of dusty old people and mid-green walls (caked-on snot?) whlst the other was a magnificent, airy, modern gallery space (a la National Portrait Gallery). You can imagine which wing I preferred, though did get told off for taking pictures — which was a strict no-no but I did it anyway.
Also went into the Irish Natural History Museum, which could best be described as a badly lit, dusty room which had small Irish animals in jars. Also walked past several Irish government buildings, which were remarkable for how small they are. If you walk through Victoria, it takes 5 minutes to just walk the length of the building that contains the Department for Transport and Industry. However long it takes you to walk past one single door is the equivalent for the Irish Finance Department. Perhaps everything just seemed quieter because the TDs had awarded themselves 11 days off for St Patrick's Day...
And to think that Home Rule was the defining question of pre-WWI politics at Westminster!
Dinner on Friday night was at a fantastic tapas bar called Salamanca (is that a river?). I ate most of the red pepper stuffed with chilli and sour cream, whilst the missus concentrated on the king prawns in chili and garlic. The missus then did as the Romans do and had a pint of Guinness whilst we listened to a couple of guitarists in a pub. I ordered what I thought was a real ale but turned out to be a cider. I pretended to the missus that I'd intended to order cider all along.
By the second day, we were pretty knackered. There's not a lot of Dublin to walk around, but it's still a lot to do in one day. So we went to Dublin Castle, concluded that it wasn't much of a castle and wondered how it could be that the Council could build what could only be described as a horrible concrete block right next to the sort-of Castle. It had a nice garden bit, though, which I suspect was ruined for the missus by an over-exuberant German photographing family.
We had a couple of excellent hours in some characterful coffee shops. Actually, it was the same coffee shop for an hour on two occasions, the return visit planned because you get a free chocolate with every drink. And it's not cheap chocolate, either. No Cadbury's in Ireland, I think.
Of course, what I haven't mentioned is the place we stayed at or the journey.
It's well known that I don't travel well. Not because I don't like travelling, but more because I'm prejudiced by experiences with my own family which lead me to believe that travelling brings out the worst in people. I would argue that my prejudices were merely confirmed by the journey there and back. The missus, however, would just say that I can be intolerable on occasions. There's certainly a happy medium in there somewhere, but I maintain that people who either (a) jump queues or (b) run to the front of them (queues not planes) so that they both can board the plane first are misguided and, frankly, sad.
The bus journey from the airport to the city centre, however, was very pleasant, cheap and incredibly frequent. I don't think we waited for more than fiveminutes in total for any of the buses we caught over the weekend.
The hotel itself was interesting, even if it was only half built. There was an overwhelming sense that a bunch of cowboys with no experience of what constitutes running a hotel had come into some money and decided to, well, run a hotel instead of blowing it all on Guinness. The place was run by a peculiar mix of young Chinese people and old Irish people (with the associated peculiarities of accent and skin complexions you'd expect by mixing the Chinese with the Irish) and served a breakfast which, though not what it said on the menu, would still count as hearty.
What I still couldn't quite get my head around was the Euro thing and the roads. Everything around us looked English and yet we were using French money. Ireland feels less European than England and yet there we were paying with Euros (in which everything feels very expensive, doesn't it?). So far as I can see, the Euro for GB is a long, long way away.
I think that covers it. The womenfolk will, I'm sure, cover what the azaleas looked like and the quality of the bed linen. Furthermore, they'll probably talk to each other instead of send emails, but such are the wonders of life.
More pictures of the trip are available at flickr.
Filed in Personal