Dublin Down

My next day in Dublin, my second, was also to be my final day in Dublin for a while.  I’m also planning to spend my final two days on this trip in Dublin, though, so I’ll be back.

I got up early and decided at first to just walk around the city and see what I could learn.  Along the way, I stopped by a shopping center for some coffee and walked through a few parks in/near the heart of the city.  I also noticed a few things.  One thing is that any woman with an Irish accent is hot.  I don’t care what she looks like.  She’s just hot.  Once she starts speaking Gaelic, that all changes, but as long as it’s English with an Irish accent, she’s hot.  Another thing that I learned is that almost every store/shop front in Dublin makes the place look like an Irish pub from the outside because of the font and size of the lettering and the dark windows.  Dentist offices, hardware stores, cheese shops; they all look like Irish pubs from the outside.  One more thing I learned is that it seems to stay light outside mighty late here.  We still have nearly a month until the longest day of the year here and at 10:00 pm, it’s still not completely dark.  Sort of reminds me of Madrid.

I walked around and through the Trinity College campus.  It wasn’t huge, as far as I could tell, and I didn’t bother to do the complete tour.  I strolled around and took some photos and then headed over to Grafton Street to see if there was anything going on.  It reminded me a lot of the Temple Bar area, which also was close by.  For lunch, I got off of my Irish food kick and stopped by the Hard Rock Café for some wings.  They were my first wings since Panama and made me happy.

After winging it, I started to search for the Dublin Castle.  I knew its general vicinity but didn’t know exactly where it was.  After walking around for an hour, I happened along a sign identifying the pedestrian entrance to the castle.  Evidently, I had walked past it a few times over the two days I was there and never even realized it.  Better late than never, I figured, and I went in.  It had started to rain, so it gave me a place to hide from the weather.  I took some photos but since the clouds were so heavy, they couldn’t help but be dark. 

Early in the evening, I walked towards the neighborhood of the bus station because I knew that I was going to have to find that early in the morning in order to catch my bus for Cork.  Not too far away, I saw a restaurant that looked pretty Irish and had relatively affordable prices.  I opted for Bangers and Mash and wasn’t disappointed at all.  I generally like spicy sausages, but the mild bangers in onion gravy kick some serious butt.  I wolfed it down with a few beers and returned to my hotel.  It was becoming painfully obvious to me, though, that I wasn’t going to be able to go out and eat and drink beer at every meal.  Dublin is pretty damned expensive.

I watched Sky News on television and brought home some Murphy’s.  I had hoped to get to bed early because I had an early bus out of town, but that didn’t work out well as insomnia took hold.  I’d like to blame it on jet lag but this seemed like good old-fashioned insomnia to me.  I finally went to sleep around 3:30 am.

I’ll pick up the trip to Cork in the next entry.