Dublin, Ireland
Friday, February 13, 2015
(Yeah, I know, I haven’t exactly been keeping up with the blogging very well have I?)
Headed out for a bit of a wander around the streets to start the day off, before heading to the Dublin City Hall. There’s a tour company in Europe, Sandeman’s New Europe Tours, that run free walking tours of a lot of major cities. I’ve done quite a few tours with them before, in Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin and Prague. Every single time they’ve been fantastic tours, and I was hoping that this would be the case as well. I think the reason for their success is that they’re free – the guides work on a tips-only basis. If you pay for a tour, the guide already has that money regardless of whether they do a good job or not. With the Sandeman’s guides, the only payment they get is whatever you tip them at the end of the tour, so they’re quite motivated to do a good job!
My guide for today was Lisa, a local Dubliner who has been doing tours here in Dublin for about two years, so she really knows her stuff! And from what Lisa said, the main reason that she was doing the tour today was that the boys had been out on the pub crawl tour they also run last night, and were feeling a bit tender this morning!
Just around the corner from where we started is Dublin Castle, which is mainly used for state visits. There’s not much of the original castle remaining, but the round tower that does is still pretty impressive. We headed past a large flat garden area near the castle, which Lisa said doubles as a helicopter landing pad for all the heads of state that visit. Lisa turned out to be a great guide, with a lot of funny stories to tell as well as telling us about the city.
As we were heading to our next stop it started to rain, and for once I was unprepared – I’d put my umbrella into my backpack for the flight over, and forgotten to return it to my day bag. Ah well.
We took shelter under the roof of a bike stand, next to the council buildings. Apparently when the buildings were under construction, there was a large amount of viking ruins discovered underneath the site. The case ended up in the high court, and they eventually gave the go-ahead for the construction, burying the ruins again. This made a lot of Dubliners rather unhappy, but there wasn’t anything that could be done.
From there we headed down to Temple Bar, the nightlife capital of Dublin. This is where U2 got their start, and they own quite a bit of property in this area as well. We stopped for a break at a small cafe, which was a nice chance to warm up from the rain. Unfortunately, the cafe was a bit too small – with two tour groups (ours and the Spanish language one) in there, plus locals, it was a bit crowded.
After the break we made our way towards Trinity College, passing the Hard Rock Cafe (which worked out well as now I knew where it was!). There wasn’t too much we could do at Trinity, as it is still a (very) active university, but Lisa gave us some of the history of the place and pointed out the building where the library and the Book of Kells is, which I’ll come back to later.
From Trinity we headed down to the final stop, just near the Irish parliament building. All in all it was a fantastic tour, and lasted almost three hours! And luckily for me it ended not too far from my hotel, so I was able to go and grab my umbrella. Of course, once I had it with me, it didn’t rain again all day!
I headed straight back to Trinity College’s library. There was a bit of a queue to get in, so I was glad that the rain had stopped! The main attraction at the library is the Book of Kells, a beautifully illustrated copy of the four gospels of the New Testament of the Bible, written around 800AD. It’s amazing that it’s survived this long, and in almost perfect condition as well. The Library has a small exhibition on the making of the book, and then the book itself (with some other manuscripts of a similar age) is displayed. Going upstairs from the exhibition, you enter what is possibly one of my favourite places of all – the Long Room. A 65m long room containing 200,000 of the library’s oldest books, it is an amazing, amazing sight. Unfortunately, my camera doesn’t like low-light environments, and the flash isn’t allowed in order to protect the books, so none of my photos came out very well. There was also an interesting exhibition on children’s books down the centre of the room.
After spending a while admiring the library, I made my way back in to the Temple Bar district, to the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner. Given that it was a Friday night it was pretty packed, but not overwhelmingly so. Had a great burger for dinner, grabbed another badge for my collection (Hm, I really need to find a way of displaying them all…) and then meandered my way back to the hotel.
