Dublin

10th - 13th August 2009

After arriving at our hostel in Dublin, we had a really good chat with the guy in reception about all the things we should and shouldn't do in Dublin. He gave us a map and highlighted all the best things to do, and definite places to avoid. It was fantastic. We set off in search of some dinner and a few drinks, and headed off to a big food area the guy had told us about. However, we couldn't find the entrance, so we kept walking. It must be one of those secret food places where you have to know the handshake or know where the magic book to pull to open the secret passageway, because we couldn't find it. We actually ended up in the Temple Bar area; The cool, happening, and very touristy area of Dublin's city centre. We chose a nice looking pub, went in and ordered some meals and drinks. Wow - people aren't wrong when they say Dublin is expensive. It is really, super doper expensive. 6 Euro's for a pint of Guinness - We're used to about £3 back in UK, and considering the Euro and the Pound change almost 1 for 1 at the moment, that's a really big jump. We didn't stick around for more bank busting drinks, but instead headed off for a bit of a look around the city.

Dublin really doesn't have any outstanding features or attractions to it, yet the tourists still flock here in there thousands. I was not overwhelmed at all when we got here. There are a lot of druggies and hobos strolling around, yelling and screaming at each other. We though that maybe we just walked through a dodgy area when we got here, but after 4 days here, it appears these deros are all through the city. We were staying near the Dublin Spire. A large pointy metal stick that just shoots up into the sky, and serves no purpose whatsoever. We did learn some local nicknames for it "The Stiffy by the Liiffey" (The Liffey is the rivger that runs througth Dublin) and "The erection in the intersection", are rather quite perfect for this monstrosity. After dinner we headed back to the hostel to figure out our plans for the next few days.

We were up at a reasonable time and headed down for breakfast at the hotel. Most disappointing free breakfast we've had this far. It consisted of some stale bread, and some disgusting juice. The spreads on the table were just peanut butter and nutella. Lucky I had my faithful jar of vegemite (Which was now bordering on empty), to scrape out to add some flavour to the horrible bread. I did notice something at the breakfast table of the couple of days we were there. The Europeans love to dunk their bread or toast with nutella into a cup of milk. I saw at least 6 or so people doing it. Gross.

We were out of there quick smart and headed off to find where the free walking tour we wanted to do left from. We had a stroll right through the centre of Dublin up to the City Hall, where there was another 100 or so people waiting to do the tour.
The walking tour was ok. I was a bit disappointed that a Canadian girl was taking it, instead of a local. And she screamed everything at us, rather than project her voice. It was really quite aggressive and annoying. Even though she'd only been here for 5 months, she did seem to know the place, and because both of her parents were Irish, she was able to tell some family stories including one about Bono stealing her father's amplifier from a gig one night. The tour took us to lots of different places - Dublin Castle (Which was one of the places the guy at the hostel told us not to waste our money on - so it was good to just go an have a look in the courtyard), The Church of Christ Cathedral, Viking ruins, Temple Bar, Trinity College, Irish Government (Which apparently what the White House was modeled off) and finished in a nice park called St Stephens Green. I walked away at the end knowing a little bit about Irelands history and their fight for independence, so I suppose I learnt something. The catch with these tours is that you just tip the guide at the end what you think it was worth. If I didn't feel so guilty about doing so I would've just walked off without paying a cent, but I couldn't so we gave her a handful of coins and left!

The tour lasted over 3 hours which we weren't expecting at all, so it was now mid afternoon, and I was a little bit weary. We ended up just laying and relaxing in the beautiful St Stephens Green for an hour or so. I could've easily stayed there for the rest of the afternoon but Dan was bored so we headed off again. We walked down one of the main shopping strips, and found a man all painted up pretending to be a statue. He was so good, a number of birds came over and perched themselves on him. We also made use of some toilets in McDonalds, and checked out the menu. Wow - even the McDonalds was expensive. Maybe we'll have to wait to the countryside until we have our Irish McDonalds experience. I'm expecting good chips.

We decided to cook for ourselves tonight and save some pennys, so after a stop at the supermarket to pick up some supplies, we made our way back to the hostel. It's amazing we didn't actually do anything else other than the walking tour, but we'd still filled the whole day in. We ended up just eating and watching some movies on the laptop for the rest of the night.

Next morning we decided that the breakfast wasn't worth getting up early for, so we had a little lie in. We started the day much later than usual and didn't end up getting out of the hostel until around 11. Dan was excited about the day as we were planning to head to the Guinness Storehouse. We decided to save our legs and jump on the tram across to the otherside of the city. For a place where the food and drink is so expensive, the public transport is really damn cheap. The little tram took about 30 minutes, and dropped us about a 20 minute walk from the Storehouse. It wasn't hard to find, with all the tourist buses heading up the road. We cheated them out of a few euros on the entrance fee as apparently I am still a student. We've been trying this out for the last few weeks without anyone questioning it. I have my old LaTrobe student card, and just flash it at them, with my thumb covering up the Valid Dates 2002 - 2005 corner. That saved us 5 Euros. I think when we get back to London I'm goingn to laminate up a student card for a fake school for Dan. The storehouse was pretty cool. You walked into 'the worlds largest pint glass', which was about 6 stories high, and all the exhibits were around the outside of it. When we were having a look at the history of Guinness advertising I decided to take a seat on othe windowsill and sat back and cracked my head on a big pipe that ran across. I saw stars for a little while, and got a little naseous, but I trooped on. We had a little tasting of the stuff on the way up, which reconfirmed that I didn't like Guinness. By the time we'd reached the 7th floor; The Gravity Bar, I was still giddy and didn't feel like a whole pint of a drink I don't enjoy anyway, so I just ordered a Pepsi (Are you proud mum? I wasn't drinking for the sake of drinking!!!) You had to exchange the stub of your ticket to claim your free drink. Anyway, the view from this round, glass, room on the top of the building, would have been spectacular, but we were crammed in with about 300 other people and couldn't move close to a window if we tried. That was a real let down. Dan finished his drink and we caught the elevator down the 7 stories to the bottom where I needed to use the loo. On walking out of the toilet I found another ticket on the ground, gave it to Dan and sent him back up to the top for another pint. We also checked out the merchandise shop. There were tonnes of stuff for sale, mainly t-shirts and kitchen stuff, but there was people going a little crazy in there. I found a nice t-shirt for Dan on the sale rack. Really good find, because it was nicer than all the other full priced ones there and it was only 8 Euros. While I sat outside waiting for Dan to finish off his second pint I observed the people walking out. Of the 30 or so groups of people to walk out, only 2 groups didn't have a merchandise bag. The folk at Guinness are definitely onto a good thing there.

We'd planned to go visit the Kilmainham Gaol whilst over this side of town, and on our map it appeared to only be a block or so over from the Storehouse. It was not. Well it might've been, but we may have taken a dodgy road or something, but it ended up taking us about 40 minutes to reach it. And by the time we'd got to the gaol there was a healthy line up of people to get in (Most of whom were holding Guinness Storehouse bags!). Whilst waiting in the line we observed the entry prices 6 for Dan, 2 for me as a student. Less than half price!!! Loving the student card! We were eventually let in and booked onto the 4.40 tour of the gaol, which gave us about 30 minutes to have a look at the gaol museum exhibition and stuff. It was pretty cool, but due to lots of words on the displays hard to take in. the tour of the gaol was pretty cool. It looks just like you'd expect and old prison to look. The guide was good and showed us where lots of the people where held from the 1916 Easter Uprising (Which I'd learnt all about on the walking tour yesterday), and where they were executed and what not. The tour lasted about an hour and afterwards we made our way back down to the tram stop and over to our side of the city. We made another stop in at the supermarket for our evening meal of Fajita's. Yum. Again we spent another boring evening at the hostel just watching Packed to the Rafters on the laptop. I am really upset though that we cant stream in Neighbours while we are outside of the UK. We are going to have to try to catch up on them during our night stopover in London on our way from Dublin to Venice!

The following morning we were up in time for the s***ty breakfast, and I had finally finished off the end of my jar of Vegemite ☹. We didn't really have plans for the day, but set off towards the centre anyway. Dan wanted to go back and check out 'his' department store - "Arnotts". Very similar to Myer, and very very expensive. We looked through a little bit until we found the sports clothes section and found the Arnott's actually sponsor the Irish Gaelic Football team, so they tops all have Arnott's written across them. The 60 Euro price tag on them quickly deflated Dan's hopes of buying one. We left the store and walked into another large shopping centre because Mr. Poo Poo Pants is not able to hold it in for any longer than 2 minutes. I swear he has bladder control issues. I spotted a large Tesco underground, and in a hope for a new jar of vegemite, I went to explore. Would you believe there was a large jar of the black stuff just waiting to be bought? I was so excited that I wouldn't have to start eating Peanut Butter or Nutella!!! We also picked up some baguettes to put some ham and cheese in, back at the hostel, for lunch. Everywhere over here has self service checkouts now, so because the baguettes we bought were loose, I had to scroll through on the screen to find them. They were mean to be 60 cents each, but I 'accidentally' pressed the wrong button for the smaller ones and all of a sudden and they're only 35 cents each. Oops. Bargain. Quickly out of the supermarket and we headed back towards the hostel to make up some lunch.

We met the hostel owner this time Seamus - good Irish name - who proceeded to tell us "How f***ing laid back us f***ing Aussies are". (Sorry for the swearing but I am quoting him) Apparently his daughters live in the capital of Australia - Wagga and he then spent the next 10 minutes telling us about Wagga, and that they have ugly fish over here with sideways heads and what not. Every second word was a naughty one, but it was entertaining nonetheless.

After lunch we had decided to catch a bus to outside of Dublin to a place called Howth. We headed down to the bus stop and the bus came pretty soon after. We hopped on and asked the driver how much, he said 4.40, and we handed him a 5-euro note. He just looked at us and said "Correct coins only, you'll have to get the next bus" without even giving Dan a chance to find the right coins. He was such a jerk. We went and changed our note over and headed back to the bus stop to catch the next bus 31. After 35 minutes of waiting, one finally turned up, with a much nicer driver, and we were on our way out of Dublin. I slept for the 40 minutes we were on the bus, but when I woke up I found ourselves to be on the summit of the little town of Howth. There were spectacular views out from the cliff faces to the ocean, and lovely flowers across the hill. We walked from the bus around the front of the cliffs and down the hill to the small village. We searched for a while for some public toilets, then picked up so lovely fresh chips and sat in the harbour and enjoyed them. There wasn't a great deal else to do in Howth so we jumped on a DART train back into Dublin. One back in town we made another supermarket stop for dinner and spent the rest of the night watching Rob Roy on the laptop. Even though we're not in Scotland anymore, I really enjoyed it - and I would thoroughly recommend it, and not only cause we've been to most of the places where it was filmed!

So now I find myself on the 3-hour train from Dublin to Galway. East coast to west. The trains over here are quite nice I must say, even though everything I'd heard or read about them before we came said quite the opposite. The transport around Ireland is going to be a problem, and I think we'll be spending a lot of time on trains and buses, and non of them seem to go directly to where we need to go ☹