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Published: July 28th 2006
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Sláinte. It means "Cheers" or "To your health."
Our original plan for this weekend had been to go to Nice and Monaco, however we could not find an express train there. We considered renting a car, but with my license having expired on my birthday and Jennifer's getting jacked in the laundromat we figured that probably wouldn't work out either. Besides, most of the places we were looking at online there was no choice of an automatic and my skills with the stickshift are few. Very very few. The roads of Spain and France are probably not the place to try to hone that talent. So when it was suggested to us that we fly to Barcelona to meet up with our crew from the first half of the summer it wasn't a very hard choice.
We left Barcelona Thursday night and got into Dublin around 11 I think. We met up with our guys at the airport but we were all staying in scattered places around the city. Jennifer, Tommy, Scottie and I went for some late Chinese food and called it a night. Sadly that is the last we saw of Brett or Scottie for the whole
We get distracted so easily
This time we were distracted by the dandilions on the walk through the grounds of the art museum to the Kilmainham Gaol. weekend. Phones were not working properly and so that made it pretty much impossible to find each other.
Dublin was in the middle of a heat wave while we were there. And by heat wave I mean somewhere around 69 degrees. That is what they think a heat wave is. In July. I wore long sleeve shirts, jeans and tennis shoes the whole time. We had a cab driver tell us that they were struggling with the heat. Surely he was kidding. Surely.
We were staying very close to Grafton Street, which is one of the most famous streets in Dublin. We had lunch and got on one of the hop on/hop off tour buses. We drove by Christ's Church, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Guinness Storehouse and got off at the Art Museum and Kilmainham Gaol. We took the tour of Kilmainham which was pretty depressing. Easter week of 1916 a group of men took over the city. They were trying to get their independence from England. The rebellion was crushed within 7 days and the men were put in to the Kilmainham prison where they were subsequently executed. One of the men got married in the chapel
Kilmainham Gaol
U2 filmed a video in this room of the jail. of the jail just hours before he was executed and his new wife was given 10 minutes to say goodbye to him in his cell right before his execution. Their rebellion failed their deaths inspired the Irish to fight for their independence which they got. It was a really interesting tour. After the jail tour, we did the Jameson tour and then had Chinese food. Yes, Chinese food twice in Ireland. What can I say, we really like steamed dumplings.
The next day we went on a tour of Trinity College. We got to see the residence hall that Oscar Wilde lived in, which was kind of cool for me because I just finished reading
The Picture of Dorian Gray a couple of weeks ago. They have a smaller version of ball that is in the courtyard at the Vatican. I think the coolest part of the tour for Jennifer and I was The Book of Kells. It is the four gospels written in some Gaelic Latin or something like that. It was written on vellum in like the 10th century or something like that. The monks that did it must have spent an unbelievable number of hours working
on it. They only used very specific materials for the inks. The red in the book came from a certain type of beetle, a pregnant beetle no less, around the Middle East or Africa. The pictures are so detailed and incredible. They have 2 books out which have been split into 4 different books and every few days they turn the pages so if you keep coming back you can see something different each time.
We took a bus tour out to Malhaide Castle. On the way out we drove through the neighborhood where Bono grew up. The castle wasn't too far outside of the city and it is on beautiful grounds. It was the home of the Talbot family for about 800 years until the 1970s when the guy that was living there died and his sister was forced to sell it to the city to cover the estate taxes. She moved to Tasmania where she still lives today. The bus drove us along the coast and through Howth on the way back to Dublin. We stopped for a photo op of the Dublin Bay. I was pretty disappointed that I didn't get to see any sheep walking
Probably the best 5 Euros ever spent in the history of the Euro
I think it must have been fate or something. There is story behind all of this, but it would take too long to tell. Let me just say that there is no other hat in the world more perfect for Tommy Wang than this hat. I promise. It is pink, it is a cowboy hat AND it has a tiara on it. Fate I tell you. across the road. We didn't actually get out into the countryside so maybe that's it. Or maybe that is just stereotypical of me to think. I mean we Texans don't ride horses to school so maybe shepards don't walk their sheep along the dirt roads of Ireland. Disappointing. I won't even mention the shocking lack of leprachauns... We ate dinner, well i should say picked up dinner, at Burdocks. It's this famous fish and chips place with several busy old Irish dudes wrapping up fish and chips in brown paper as fast as they can because the line goes out the door. They have a list of the famous people that have gotten fish and chips from there, including Sandra Bullock, Christi Turlington, Metallica, and Ron Howard.
Our last day in Dublin I did a quick walking tour of the city to make sure I had seen everything I could. We had been down O'Connell Street a couple of times but further down was the Garden of Rememberance. (O'Connell Street is named for one of the leaders of the 1916 rebellion.) The Garden is dedicated to the people that died in 1916 for Irish freedom. There is a statute
Malahide Castle
Yay for castles and pink tiara cowboy hats from Ireland. of children turning into swans. Legend has it that when Ireland is wholly united the swans will turn back into children and fly away, whatever that means.
We ate in St. Stephen's Green and had to get a cab to the airport. Our cab driver asked us where we were from and when we found out we're from Texas he spent the rest of the ride lecturing us about how George Bush is ruining the world, making it hard for Americans to travel, etc. etc. Thanks, buddy. Aside from a weird cab driver, we found the Irish people to be pretty nice. I think we appreciated being able to communicate without a problem. The weather was a nice break from the sweltering heat of air-conditionerless Barcelona too :-)
That's about it for the Dublin weekend. We've been busy girls in Barcelona so I need to catch that up but it will have to wait. So for now - Sláinte.
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