Blogs from Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland, Europe - page 94

I hope everyone had a great St. Patrick's Day! Before babbling about what I've been up to lately, I wanted to write a bit about the little things I've noticed about living here and to maybe give you all an idea of what's it like beyond the photos. French fries are "chips" and potato chips are "crisps". Stores are shops and lines are queues. Movies are films. Baby strollers are prams. "Slagging" means teasing. You can't say "excuse me" because it's considered rude; you must say "sorry". "Sorry" for bumping into you, "sorry" if you need to move past them, "sorry" if you need someone's attention. Shop employees and servers will ask "Are you ok?" to mean "Can I help you?". This completely threw me off the first couple of times: when I responded, "Yeah, I'm ... read more

Right, I’m back from Ireland and have managed to survive with my liver intact. Actually I didn’t once wake up with a hangover, which I think is more down to the lack of preservatives in the locally brewed Guinness than any lack of alcohol consumption. Also this blog is going to be separated in 2. Half because I did so much and there are a lot of photos, and half because I want one for Ireland and one for Northern Ireland. Alright, the 10 day trip started with getting up very early on a Saturday morning to catch a coach out to Holyhead in Wales where we took the Ferry across to mainland Ireland. Then it was a short trip into Dublin where we were greeted with rain as we checked into our hostel. We were ... read more

We've finally made it!! Trip from Newark to Dublin was great. No bad turbulence, somewhat decent food, and we got here on time. Then the fun began. Time to pick up the car and get directions to the hotel. The directions from the Car rental rep: take M1 to M50 to N7...no...N4 and the hotel is on the left, verbatim. No map, no take a left here or go down 5 km there, just M1 to M50 to N4. Easy, right? And throw in the fact that I have never driven from the right side of the car. Yes, I think you can see how much fun my first drive in Ireland was going to be. At first it was not too bad because everything was mostly one way with no oncoming traffic. But, then I ... read more

A trip to Ireland, the land of leprechauns, shamrocks, and the color green...... read more

I hope this doesn't sound really tedious. I'm really just putting down my journal entries from the trip, edited of course. There are some things you people don't need to know. :) So on to Day 2: Where do I start in describing the activities for the day? The beginning is probably good. We set off for Trinity College at 9am to see the Book of Kells. The campus is beautiful, the old buildings wonderfully kept and the new ones expressing a pretty contemporary Irish architecture. It's in a really bustling area but inside the gates it is really peaceful. The BoK was really impressive. The condition of this manuscript is just amazing. The skill of illuminating these pages so long ago is remarkable. After talking with some people outside the library we started a walking ... read more