Sunday, 27th July                   DUBLIN

Robyn writes: Our last day in Dublin at this stage today, and we both managed to have an excellent night's sleep and be up reasonably early. We headed out at about 9.30 - Lex to the Writer's Museum and me to the shops to look for a new pair of walking shoes/sandals - my poor old red ones are getting extremely flat and not very supportive these days! Neither of us had much luck at first - Lex got to the Writer's Museum and discovered that it WASN'T open from 9.30, as it had said on the internet (that's the second time that's happened to us - notions of time are extremely fluid in Ireland!) - on Sundays it's open from 11. So he went off for a nice long walk to wait for it to open. I discovered that, unlike Australia, the vast majority of shops don't open at 10am on Sundays - they open at 11 or even 12! The tourist shops, however, were open in their multitudes, so I enjoyed browsing them. I took the tourist bus down to Trinity College and had a nice walk around the campus there. It has some beautiful buildings. It was going to cost 9 Euros to get in and see the Book of Kells, so I decided against that - I figured that for 12 Euros just the other day we got an entire day at the Louvre and all of Europe's treasures, so I had seen enough for one week!

 Trinity College

 I loved the buskers in Grafton Street - this one was painted as a statue and was attracting a lot of real pigeons!

St Stephen's Green Shopping Centre

I then walked up to Grafton Street and the mall there and enjoyed looking around the shops there and at the nearby shopping centre (but had no luck with finding any comfy shoes) until one o'clock, when it was time to meet Lex at the Little Museum of Dublin. He rang to say he was on a tourist bus but was still a quarter of an hour away (those things take forever in the Dublin traffic) but luckily there was a nice little cafe right next door, so I popped in and had a cuppa and a scone while I waited for him. When he arrived, we walked to a sandwich store in the mall and got ourselves some rolls and wedges for a picnic lunch in St Stephen's Green, the big park right next to the end of the mall. It was a very agreeable place to sit in the sun or shade and watch the Dubliners enjoying their Sunday all around us. When we'd finished our lunch, we walked around the park to see what was there - it's a really nice green space for all of the city dwellers and was being very well used.

Lex in the park

 Some lovely flower gardens

This was erected in memory of the famine victims

At the Little Museum of Dublin - me and Mrs Brown!

 

                                            

Lex and the perfect pint

Then we headed across the road to the Little Museum of Dublin. This is reasonably new - set up in the last few years from donations by the people of Dublin, and tells the story of it basically from the beginning of last century. We did a tour with a fabulous guide who was very entertaining and really made it all interesting. They also had a U2 room which was great to see, and a temporary display about Brendan O'Carroll from 'Mrs Brown's Boys'. I don't know about the actor himself, but his family is quite fascinating - his grandfather was Michael Collin's second in charge and was executed at his house one night during The Troubles, and his mother was the first woman voted into the Irish Parliament. We spent a very enjoyable couple of hours at the museum, before heading off again.

We walked back home (via several more unsuccessful forays into shoe shops) and went to a nearby pub, The Celt for a drink on the way home. It wasn't living up to its name - tonight there was country and western music playing! Dublin has a sad tale at the moment - this weekend was supposed to be a huge C&W weekend with several Garth Brooks concerts sold out to several hundred thousand people. Unfortunately, the tickets were sold "subject to license" and the license was refused and all of the tickets had to be refunded! Apparently, according to our taxi driver, this happens quite frequently and makes them the laughing stock of the world. So all of these poor people had already bought travel and accommodation and of course you don't get THAT refunded! I noted today that Garth Brooks T-shirts are now 3 for 10 Euros....and all of these disconsolate fans wandering around in big hats looking for C&W music! Anyway, our pub's music was dreadfully loud so we only had one drink (Lex had a perfect Guinness while I had a fairly vicious little Sav Blanc) then headed home to cook tea and PACK. Again. Tomorrow we collect our third hire car and head for Tullamore in Offaly (very close to Daingain, home of the Cuskelly family).