Friday, 25th July                          DUBLIN

Robyn writes: Another glorious day here in Dublin - beautifully sunny and a lovely 23 degrees apparently, though I suspect it was probably a bit warmer. We managed a bit of a sleep in; Lex was up at around 7.30 and I staggered out at just after 8, to find that Sandy had just called on Skype. So I got a cup of tea and called her back; had a good chat about what's going on at home. Sooo glad I'm half a world away from Explicit Instruction!

 National Museum of Archaeology and History

After breakfast, we got ourselves organised and headed out at around ten to walk to the museums district across the river. We stopped at the tourist information place on O'Connell Street to get some maps and we also bought tickets for the hop-on, hop-off bus tour for tomorrow and Sunday. They were 19 Euros each and go for all day from 9 to 9, unlike a lot of cities where they end at 6 and are only for one day. Then we walked across the bridge and found the Museum of Archaeology & History in Kildare Street. It's in a beautiful building dating back to 1890 and is a wonderful storehouse of so many of the artefacts that have been discovered over the years.

 Stunning gold jewellery

The top gold circular shapes are earlobe stretchers! The bottom ones are bracelets.

 Silver Viking cloak brooches - amazing craftsmanship

Viking warrior burial with sword and dagger

We spent several hours at the museum, with a break for lunch (excellent) at the cafe there. They have displays right back to Irish prehistory, including several bog bodies, which were quite fascinating. There were also displays of the Vikings in Ireland (there were a lot of them in Dublin especially) and some of the most fabulous golden jewellery I've ever seen. They were wonderful craftsmen. Then were displays about medieval Ireland and again some wonderful craftsmanship. We really enjoyed the museum, and at 2.30 we met up and then headed around the corner to the National Art Gallery. We spent a while there looking at the exhibits there before walking back home. Probably it wasn't a good idea to do this just days after the treasures of the Louvre - I'm sure any art gallery would suffer in comparison! Some lovely pieces of art, anyway, and we discovered some Irish artists we'd never seen before.

 Ireland's most famous bog body, Old Croghan Man - as he is today, and a reconstruction of how they think he looked in life, above.

While I headed home for a cuppa, Lex went off looking for Guinness T-shirts and came back with three - mission accomplished! He's also been for a walk down to the Royal Canal while I've been cooking tea (Irish pork chops and potatoes and SALAD. It's great being able to put greens back in the diet again!) Since then, he's been happily watching the Tour de France. There's good coverage on TV here. We've also been researching things to visit over the next two days while we have the tour bus tickets - will be nice to have some transport and not have to walk all the way. It's the first time on this holiday that we've bought the hop-on, hop-off tickets, as they are normally so expensive, but this seems quite cost effective for two days, especially as the trams are no good for where we're staying and the bus pass would cost us a minimum of 10 Euros anyway. At present, a lot of the city centre is a mess, as they are finally building the connection between the two different Luas (tram) lines in the city, and this means going right through the CBD. It's a time consuming process as they keep digging up medieval bodies (there was an abbey there) and of course every time they find bones, they have to call in the osteo-archaeologists and stop work! It will be really good when it's done though. Will see how the bus tour goes, anyway - the weather is supposed to get a bit cooler over the next few days but hopefully not much chance of rain. It should be nice to just sit up the top of the double decker bus and ride around and look at the sights for some of the time!