Noel's Adventure(s): February 5: MORE DUBLIN!

Me by the River Liffy in the rain

We were ready to go and in the hostel's breakfast room at 7:30am. The food was actually much better than I would have expected, especially for hostel free breakfast. I wouldn't have paid for it or anything, but there was toast with decent strawberry jam and a knockoff brand of Nutella that tasted kind of like bad chocolate frosting in a can, cornflakes, milk, orange juice, canned mixed fruit, coffee, and hard boiled eggs. I had packed two sandwiches at home, so I didn't even need to filch lunch. We were on the streets by 8, heading to Trinity College to explore. Unfortunately, it was raining pretty hard, but at least the streets were pretty much deserted. I think you're supposed to pay something like 11 Euro to tour Trinity, but we must have looked like students or something, because no one stopped us so we just waltzed right up and started snooping around. It was really beautiful. I was amazed at how huge some of the trees were in the courtyard. They must be hundreds and hundreds of years old! I had wanted to go see the exhibition of the Book of Kells, but it was closed so we contented ourselves with wandering around the beautiful campus. Everything was so lovely, we were very upset at having had our vacation cut short by the travel delays the day before, so we decided to call Aer Lingus and see if there was any way we could get a later flight out of Dublin on Sunday (ours was going to leave at 1:00pm). The lady we spoke to said it was no problem, and offered us a flight at 6:30, so we were quite pleased with the airline's customer service at least. This left us with almost all of Sunday to spend in Ireland.

At Malahide Castle

At 10:30 we headed to the point where we were supposed to meet our bus for a tour of the Northern Coast and Malahide Castle, which we had booked a few weeks before online. The bus driver was a very friendly, knowledgeable gentleman named Joe, who had a Master's degree in English Literature, so we all got along wonderfully (my friend Leigh is also an English major) and Joe pointed out lots of literary sites in Dublin, mostly places associated with James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. The tour was lovely. Though it was still raining terribly, the coast was absolutely beautiful. When we stopped at a harbor, we even saw a harbor seal swimming in the cold Irish Sea! The little coastal towns were fun to look at as well. Malahide Castle was absolutely breathtaking. It's a very old stone castle dating back to the Normans in the 1100s. Two moats encircle the castle itself, which is just what you'd expect an old Irish castle to look like. The history was pretty interesting, too. It belonged to one family, the Talbots from the 1100s through 1973, when the last surviving Talbot sold the castle to the Irish government. The castle had some very pretty gardens around it, which I'm sure are beautiful in spring. My friends and I absolutely loved the tour.

When we got back to Dublin around 1:30, we headed over to the Thai place we had tried to eat at the night before. Our friends had said it was really good and really cheap, and they were right! I had about a full quart of Pad Thai noodles with peanuts and veggies and chicken, and I'm pretty sure I finished it in under 5 minutes, I was so hungry. We then went running over to the Guinness Factory for our tour. Honestly, I was pretty underwhelmed by the Guinness tour. I had hoped to see the actual brewing process, but it was more like a Disney Wold exhibit, with posters declaring the "Four Ingredients: Barley, Hops, Water, and Yeast" and fake hops plants and a big fountain and a huge tub of dried barley and a diagram of a yeast cell. It was really disappointing. I wanted to see the vats where the brewed the beer! On the plus side, at the very top of the building is a place called "Gravity Bar," which gave a fantastic view of Dublin. The view was good enough to make up for the bad tour, and the complimentary pint of Guinness helped as well. I'm convinced it really did taste better 7 stories above Dublin than anywhere else I've tried it. Of course the bartender included a shamrock in the foam.

Me at Christ Church Cathedral

After the Guinness Factory, my friends had booked a 4pm tour of the Jameson Whiskey factory, but I had decided to do something on my own, since I'm not a whiskey drinker. I decided to see if I could tour Christ Church Cathedral, since we had passed it when its bells were ringing the night before. Unfortunately for me, there was a service starting at 5, and I didn't think I'd have enough time to stay for the whole thing, so I wasn't able to get into the church. Instead, I went across the road to the Dublinia Museum, which I had seen advertised as a Viking and Medieval Dublin exhibit. It was actually a very good museum. The first floor was all about how the Vikings had actually settled Dublin, and the word Dublin comes from the Norse words "Duvh Linn," meaning "Black Pool." There were recreated Viking ships and settlements and lots of good information. The second floor was about Medieval Dublin, and had a recreated village and some excavated artifacts. The third floor was actually my favorite. It was about the process of excavating ancient Dublin from underneath the modern city, and it was a surprisingly fun, informative exhibit. The artifacts shown were pretty neat as well (my favorites were 4 Viking warrior's skeletons buried with their weapons and shields that had been newly excavated). I was supposed to meet my friends about two blocks away from the museum and Chirst Church at 5:15, and the museum closed at 5, so I was headed to our meeting point, the pub from the night before, by 4:50. I had planned on waiting for them inside, because it was pouring rain and super windy, but the waitress I asked didn't seem to like that idea, so I had to wait outside, which was not fun. My friends didn't show up till after 6, so I had to spend over an hour in freezing cold rain coming at me sideways. My boots, my socks, my jeans, my jacket, and even my umbrella were soaked and completely useless by the time they got there. I really wished I had known, because I could have gone to church at Christ Church Cathedral while I waited!

Anyway, in spite of my misery, we carried on with our supper plans. We had seen lots of these funny little fast food joints called "Abrakebabra" everywhere, so we had wanted to give one a shot. It was basically a fast-food kebab place, which was pretty strange. The food was ok. I probably wouldn't willingly eat there again, but I'm glad we did it. A place called Abrakebabra is just too intriguing to pass up! We then went back to the hostel, where we had planned on dressing up and going out to Temple Bar, but I was far too soaked to even think about going anywhere. My feet were so cold that they burned, and everything I owned was dripping. We talked about what we each wanted to do tomorrow, and my friends wanted to go shopping and roam the city a bit more, but I really wanted to do something more with my time in Dublin than go shopping. I had heard about a different tour, of the Southern Coast and Powerscourt Gardens done by the bus company we went with the day before, and Joe was even going to be the driver again, so I decided to try that out. It seemed perfect, since I knew I wanted to try to make church at St Patrick's Cathedral at 8:30am, and I needed to kill time till 4pm, and the tour went from 11-3:30, so it was exactly what I was looking for.

I had 3 roommates that night, the girl from the night before, who was a very nice French girl in Dublin on an internship who was looking for a flat, and 2 Portuguese girls, who didn't speak English. My French friend and I had a nice evening chatting and reading, and went to bed by 10. The Portuguese girls came back drunk at 3am, which was fun. I had set my alarm for 6:45, but I woke up at 5:15, misread the clock and thought it was 6:15 so I didn't even try sleeping, but then I realized my error at 5:45 but it was too late to sleep, so anyway, long story short: I didn't get much sleep but I was ready to go and in the breakfast room by 7:20. To be continued...