Dublin Trip

I was sitting on the upper bunk of a Dublin hostel. As I sat there, swinging my legs, I repeated to myself, almost mantra-like, that I was going to be grown up about this: I was here to see the city, after all, and the whole thing was absolutely not going to slip by in a boozy fog! I’d been to Dublin a couple of years before with some friends from university. This weekend, I resolved to myself, however, it would be different. So, I jumped down off the bed, and with this firmly in mind, hit the ground running (so to speak), and got amongst the sights early.

Kilmainham Gaol was high on my list of things to do. Way out to the west of the city, this brooding 19^th century hulk of a place has excellent guided tours, around the tiny cells and echoing passageways. Having got my bearings, found the place, and been round it, though, the morning had all but passed. So I charged back, past the Guinness Brewery on James’s St. to the center of town for lunch, and soon found a fantastic place on South Great George’s St. called ‘Strobe’.

As I sat there, watching the world go by, I idly flicked through a copy of the Irish Independent. One of the things I find most satisfying about being in away from home is reading a local newspaper. It’s actually quite refreshing, knowing practically nothing about its contents!

After lunch, the National Gallery and the National Museum were next on my list. Far more convenient to get to than Kilmainham, they sit, practically alongside each other on Kildare St. just next to Merrion Square (to the east of the city center).

Scattered about several different wings, the National Gallery has a great (and fantastically diverse) collection of European art, while the National Museum boasts some amazing gold artifacts, a lot of which had been dredged out of peat bogs all over the country.I stopped off at the supermarket on the way home, and that evening prepared a meal with a couple of new-found friends I made in the kitchen. There was a good bunch in the hostel at the time, and a couple of bottles of wine were soon (very generously) being offered around.

After a couple of slugs of wine, I totally forgot about my resolution, and a big, Guinness-fueled rampage around the fair old city was soon under way. We started off with a few beers at the atmospheric ‘Flowing Tide’ pub, just round the corner from the hostel on Abbey St. Lower.

After that, where it was we went, I can’t, in all honesty, recall, but I seem to remember that the streets on the Northside around Queen St. were particularly jumping. Anyway, we staggered home wearily, much, much later than I’d planned to.