Birthday Dublin

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Our first trip out was to Dublin for my (Ros) birthday. On the Airlink bus into the city from the airport, I was struck by the boarded up windows of several old buildings right on the river Liffey. However, Temple Bar (where we were staying) was much more living and seemed to be bursting at the seams with shops, restaurants and PUBS.

Karen, a school friend of mine, gave us lovely tour through Trinity College. The Book of Kells was interesting and the Long Library beautiful - but my favourite was Karen's story about a shootout between university students and a lecturer in days gone by! On Saturday evening the town got really busy with Irish merrymaking and we enjoyed a bit of a pub crawl through The Quays, BADBOBS (the sign looked just like BAOBOBS, so we called it that) and finally The Porterhouse. In Baobobs there was a stuffed deer wearing the exact same scarf as I was, which had us in stiches. Most of the pubs had live music (mostly doing covers) and we really enjoyed singing along and playing a competition of guess the band - which I won of course!

We ended up doing a day trip at my insistence. It was fun to see a bit of the countryside and an ancient monastic site at Glendalough, but the gardens of the Powerscourt estate were a bit underwhelming in January. James was very impressed with an ancient stone church which had a stone roof - the walls were about a foot thick to support it.

Overall it was quite green - even the people seemed to wear green more than in other parts of the world.

On the way home we were let straight through customs without going through passport control - is this normal, or did the Ryanair bus just drop us off at the wrong gate??

We didn't take many photos (NONE of the city - even though I loved the buildings and bridges - sorry!) - but that should be rectified on the next trip because I've just opened my birthday present - a camera! Thanks bab.

We managed to consume a few of Ireland's finest, Guinness, which tasted many multiples better than those offered back in Cape Town, we think this had a lot to do with the location at which these were consumed. Our AirBnB host, Dave, was particularly welcoming and had created a map of Dublin with all his personal favourite locations, mostly pubs, restaurants and MacDonalds (because you can use their free WiFi from outside). Dublin felt small/quaint and easy to navigate.

Bikeability: We didn't cycle, but Dublin is quite a flat city and there were a few bikes around. There are some bike lanes (mostly the painted kind) and advance stop lines, but similar to what we have in Cambridge.

Tandems spotted: 0

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