Marvel Mania in Dublin

We love you guys.







We see Marvel things and think of you.




One day we will have to come back here with you both and eat at this cafe! I wonder if we will run into Wolverine or Iron Man when we do?

Last Day in Dublin

After Guinness we had some free time for the last time in Dublin. We decided to head out of the hotel to grab some lunch. We ended up at a wonderful restaurant and shared a table with a very interesting gentleman. He was very friendly and had a big a poster he was trying to balance on the chair across from him. He then turned to us and asked us if we wanted to see the new stamp that would be released tomorrow. We said of course and he sure enough showed us a stamp he had the idea for. He was involved with the entire process of getting it made and approved by the government. He was had been a big wig in the Unions here and it is some Union hero. We got a sneak peak at Ireland's new stamp. Too bad we won't be here tomorrow to buy it.





After lunch we headed back to St. Stephen's Green Park. We had been there on the first day but got kicked out after just a few minutes when it closed. We walked around the arc that is the gateway to the park. It was in the movie "Once" that we love.











The park was beautiful. The flowers were all in bloom and the trees were green and lovely. I have a magic umbrella. If I carry it around during the day, it won't rain. But, if I forget it, even for an hour, the rain will pour down. I brought the umbrella, so we had an overcast, but not rainy afternoon.


After the park we headed out for some shopping on Grafton Street for souvenirs for all our babysitters and our kiddos. The street scenes are so much fun. There is always some kind of performer every couple of blocks and the flower markets are so gorgeous down the street. It was a nice relaxing end to the day before we head off to London in the morning.












Fair Dublin we have enjoyed our time with you and will cherish our memories!

Guinness

Today's "business" visit was at Guinness brewery. I used quotation marks because the point of these business visits was to answer the question "Why Ireland" for a paper the students are going to write for the International Trip Class (You know, the whole reason we are here.) I think "Why Ireland" is not going to be answered by having a tour guide give us the standard tourist tour around the brewery. Plus, it is a stupid question for Guinness anyway. The founder was a Dubliner and Irish people like to drink. End of reason.
The tour was actually interesting (in a tourist sense, not a business sense). The building is set up for these tours and is quite well done. Better than some of the museums we have seen. There was a fun section to see all the commercials they have done as well as an advertising section displaying some of the promotions they had done. My favorite was the idea to put 50,000 Guinness bottles into the ocean with notes to see how many turn up. There are still some turning up on beaches even today.
The tour concludes with a free pint of Guinness on top of their building in the "gravity bar". As 50% of those on the trip are tea-toting, this was a place we got a lot of strange looks sipping on our cokes and sparkling waters. The view from this area was a 360 degree view of Dublin. It was the first chance to get up high and see all over the city and it was quite lovely. I loved the motto they had painted on one of the rafters "On March 17th, everyone's Irish". I bet that is like Christmas day for an (actually, THE) Irish Brewer.

Western Ireland Bus Tour

With no visits today, and having had quite a long while in Dublin to explore the big group of 40 decided to hire a couple of busses to drive us out to the country side. The places that were most popular in the vote were Belfast and Galaway. We chose the latter, since the Belfast bus ride took even longer than the Galaway one. We woke up early and boarded the Paddywagon tour bus around 7 a.m. we drove around Dublin for an hour picking up other groups who were to share our bus adventure and then headed out into the country side.
One thing to note about Ireland. It may be a European country, but it is not the wealthiest of the EU nations. There are some major roads around Dublin, but no major highways or freeways, merely 2 lane roads that wind from village to village to medium size cities all around the country. This makes traveling within Ireland very tiresome and time consuming! In a country the size of West Virginia we spent a good 13 hours on a bus today to go 266 km (or roughly 165 miles or about 2-2 1/2 hours in the U.S.) Our first stop after an hour of driving was a 20 minute photo op in Limerick at the castle of St. Johns. It was right on the banks of River Shannon (the largest in Ireland). It was gray and raining and the river was full to capacity. It was a charming little town with pretty churches and charming, but run down town homes. It was green and lovely like the rest of the country. Driving to Limrick and getting out of the city for a minute, I realized that many of the Ireland cliches actually seem to hold true. The green is like no other green I have ever experienced. The people and their accents are just like I thought and the patchwork of little green fields divided off by low rock walls are just like all the photos and paintings I have seen before the visit.
After the quick stop in Limrick, we, along with 50 of our bus buddies, jumped back on the Paddywagon and drove on. (And on and on, it seemed) to make another quick 30 minute stop in Burren. Burren was explained to us as an ancient sea bed. It was full of interesting Limestone and was right along the coast. We had fun hiking out over the rocks to the shore to enjoy some fresh sea air and a minute of leg stretching! It was lovely and not something we could have experienced had we stayed in the city.
More driving and then we finally stopped in Doolin for a quick bite of lunch and boarded to again drive (this time only a few minutes) to the main attraction of the bus ride, the Cliffs of Moher. It was an amazingly picturesque site with the dramatic cliffs with the white water of the waves crashing against them. There were 40,000 seagulls circling the cliffs looking for places to build their nests. There was a tower (no idea how old or what it went to, but it sure added to the scenery). We enjoyed our longest bus riding break of 1 1/2 hours and loaded up to head back to Dublin.
The bus driver promised us that if we were good little boys and girls he would stop at Bunratty castle on the way home. We did. For 15 minutes. I took a photo, looked for 5 minutes in the gift shop and got back on the bus, so I know nothing about the history or what it looks like inside. It was a pretty little castle and that is the very most I can tell you. What I learned about Ireland on this adventure: They need a freeway around the edge of the island! The pictures in the story books and movies not only did not lie about the beauty of this land, but did not do it justice and finally, they spell the word TIRE, TYRE (strange, no?).

Visiting the IDA and the National Gallery

Up until today, this has felt like a strange, wonderful, long vacation with 38 other people. It has felt like we signed up for a tour group view of Ireland. (Something we would never do). Today, however, was an actual business visit. We visited the IDA. It is an agency responsible to helping recruit businesses to make Ireland their base in Europe. The man who gave the presentation did a wonderful job, being very real about Ireland's current position in this new global economy.


After the visit, Bill and I took off to hunt down lunch, get some good alone time, and try and visit some shops. We burned out on that after a couple of hours and went to the National Gallery of Art to enjoy some amazing art. We saw works by Vermeer, Picasso, Reubens, Renior, Monet, and many others I am sure I am forgetting. We only had an hour until it closed, so we had to move much more quickly than I normally would have liked. But better quick than not at all.

Over all it was a much less hectic day and a welcome respite from the packed schedule we have been keeping ever since we landed on Irish soil.

Church on Sunday

Our local "tour guide" from the table at the cafe had recommended Cobblestone bar for local Irish Folk Music and being the best "local" bar scene. She warned us that it was located in a building that looked like it was scheduled for demolition soon. She was not kidding. It was pretty run down on the outside. The inside was a bit better. It was packed. It was all you imagine when you think Irish pub, but the music was not great that night. We stayed for about 15 minutes and since we didn't have any Guinness to nurse while we were hanging out, and the music wasn't very good, there was not excuse to stay.





Since it was Sunday, we decided to head over to church. The church is a bar in Dublin in an old converted church building (Hence the name, clever, no?) It is the church were John Wesley preached from the pulpit and Handel practiced the Messiah on the organ. Not bad in the way of history. This place was also crowded, but we scored a table toward the front of the church. We settled in to order our dinner, when a couple of musicians started setting up right in front of us. We had picked the place for dinner ambiance, but we were happily surprised to find GREAT music as the bonus. The video here: is dark and impossible to see the musicians, but you still can hear how fun it was. It was such a great old building, and a great place to eat a wonderful meal and enjoy some of that famous Irish Folk Music. Remember, the building, being a church and all, has great acoustics!

By the end of the day (starting with the Liam Howth tour) it felt like a week had passed, after we enjoyed our favorite day in Ireland so far.

Dublin Day

After saying good-bye to dear ol' Liam, we decided to see if we could learn a bit more about Dublin on our own. We headed over to the Dublin castle to take the tour they offer. The Dublin Castle consists of one remaining tower from the 1200 a.d. structure. Apparently some brilliant bloke thought it would be a good idea to do a "controlled" demolition to fight a fire to save the castle by blowing up explosive right next to the tower that held all the gun powder and blew up the majority of the castle in the process. The rebuilt structure off of the original tower is a hodge podge of styles and colors (see two pictures below: those stucco buildings are attached to the old part of the castle. And I thought that our neighbors house was an eyesore to the neighborhood and didnt' fit in.) and now they use the building for official state offices.
I am not sure if the tour was really as good as we thought it was, or if it was merely wonderful in comparison to Liam's tours, but we learned so much about the history of the city we are calling home for the next few days. The guide did a wonderful job of making the "history" interesting and relevant and we learned enough to start applying that knowledge to things we had been seeing around town, but didn't know what they were. We had seen plaques all over the city with an odd shape and a star. After the castle tour we realized that hundreds of years ago, before the castle was blown up, the city had been enclosed by a wall and it was the shape of this old wall (the city boundries) and the star was a "you are here" symbol. Even our tour guide didn't know that. Aren't we clever?
We walked around the grounds of the "castle" and found a hidden courtyard that had a wonderful grassy area, broken up with winding paths of brick.



They were in the shape of snakes, with glass eyes and heads at the beginning of the paths. I thought there weren't any snakes in Ireland. We grabbed a quick bite at this wonderful cafe on the premises. It was such a great cafe, there weren't any empty tables, so we had to be very "European" and share with a unsuspecting woman. We started to chat her up and she gave us some wonderful suggestions on "local secrets" and places to get some local flavor. So after the tour, we decided to try them out. We started walking around to a bar that was to have the most wonderful, authentic local music called COBBLESTONE.
On our hike to the bar to hear some Irish folk music, we stumbled upon part of the old city wall from the 1200's. It was hidden in the middle of this neighborhood and was now part of a wall surrounding a church. A few hours before, none of us would have noticed this wall, but the tiny sign above the gate caught our attention and we headed over to check it out. It is amazing to see structures that are hundreds of years old still standing in any form.

We got sidetracked from our hike to the bar, and decided to try and get into St. Patrick's cathedral next. It was open when we got there, but they charged 5 Euros to get in. I have spent a lot of time in churches in Europe and have NEVER been charged to get inside. We bartered with the priest in charge and got in for 3 Euros each instead. (Do you think that is grounds for going to Hell?) It was nice. It was like every other cathedral I have ever seen. I still don't get the "admission" fee into a church that currently has a congregation and holds services. But what do I know, I am just a silly American.

Howth and Malahide Castle

Last day with Liam and he did not disappoint. Our infamous elderly tour guide, guided the group onto the bus early on Sunday morning to go on a "picturesque tour of the coast." We drove for about 30 minutes north of Dublin to Howth. We parked the bus and were able to hike a bit around the top of this hillside that overlooked the Irish Sea. We had lovely weather and a lovely view. It was nice to see a bit of the coastline and to get out of Dublin for a bit to see some more of Ireland.
Our next stop on Liam's Bus o' Fun was at Malahide castle. This was our first castle visit of the trip. It was all that one expects from an old castle. Made of lots of stone so as to be foreboding and imposing looking to the commoners and the external threats. It had been part of a single family's estate for 800 years, but was sold to the government to pay the taxes after that. (Isn't that the way!) Once you enter this giant structure you can tell immediately that the government may own it, but they don't really love the castle the way a private owner would. It is a bit worn down. As lovers of older homes and preservationists, Bill and I just wanted to get some lemon oil out to give that dry thirsty wood a good drink of moisture and sand down all of the poor plaster jobs and repaint the sun-faded rooms.
The castle had beautiful, well-maintained gardens and was adjacent to what appeared to be city park land with a wonderful playground for children and soccer/rugby fields. After the castle tour, Bill and I snuck away from the group for a few minutes to walk around and enjoy them. After the castle we drove back into Dublin to conclude our time with Liam. Though he was not terribly informative, he was a wonderful Irish character that I will never forget. (And that is saying a lot!)

Too cheap for a taxi

Bill and I like to walk. Part of the reason is we are too cheap to constantly pay taxis to do what our feet can do for us, part of the reason is to burn off some of the calories from all the delicious (Ireland has great food, who knew?) food we have been eating. The bonus consequence of these two great reasons is that we have had a chance to get up close and personal with some off beat, beautiful parts of the city, that just can't be enjoyed from the window of a taxi. Our first photo op came along the River Liffey banks where we had a stunning view of the Customs Hall building
The river Liffey separates the north and south sections of the city. It is beautiful and rises and falls with the tide from the Irish sea. Our hotel is a block from the waterfront and we have been walking miles in and out of town exploring every nook and cranny our tired legs can carry us to.
One of the fun places our legs made it to was the Ha' Penny Bridge over the river. It's name comes from the toll that was charged (half a penny) to cross it in years past. Luckily, we cheap-skates came to visit many years after that practice was abolished.
Our walk home last night, after our bar-hopping, Dublin atmosphere-soaking-in adventures came to an end. We crossed the bridge to find the tide in and the river's flow at a stand still as the waters current couldn't decide if it was coming or going and the water was perfectly still. The night was clear and beautiful. The view was lovely and peaceful and will remain a wonderful memory. (And a nice place to enjoy a kiss with my handsome husband.)

Christ Church

Dublin has no shortage of churches (Actually, that could be said of all of Ireland). They are monstrous and beautiful buildings full of all kinds of history (not all of it positive) and stunning glass and architectural details.
Christ church cathedral is one of the most important churches in Ireland, history wise. The cathedral is located in the former heart of mediaeval Dublin. However a major dual carriage-way building scheme around it separated it from the original mediaeval street pattern which once surrounded it, with it original architectural context (at the centre of a maze of small buildings and streets) lost both by road-building and by the demolition of the older residential quarter at Wood Quay. As a result the cathedral now appears dominant in isolation behind new civil offices along the quays, out of its original mediaeval context.
The amount of stained glass is astonishing and lovely. The cathedral is imposing in the middle of town, taking up the better part of a city block. It is humbling to think of how many people over the hundreds and hundreds of years of its existence have crossed its threshold and worshiped there. Having recently read a novel that fictionally covered the corruption of the church while attached to the state, I also have to wonder what kinds of corruption and history making happened behind its beautiful closed doors.

Jet Lag

Out of order chronologically, but none the less still part of our Ireland experience-- getting off of a 24 hour journey and being put on a bus and not being taken straight to the hotel to shower, but on an 3 hour bus ride around Dublin. Our first stop was being dropped off in the middle of town and being told we had 30 minutes to find lunch. Bill and I headed to a local bookstore and found a cafe upstairs. I think I had some warm carrot and parsnip soup. I think it was very good. I am not sure I remember correctly, because I was so tired and disoriented! We then walked as a group of 40 jet-lagged MBA students and some spouses to the Trinity College campus where I think we saw the book of Kells. A VERY old copy from the Gospels made a long time ago, by some monks. I think. I really didn't catch much from that particular stop.
Afterwards we did check in, and shower and put our bags down and catch our breath and then we headed out to walk around the city. We ended up in St. Stephen's Green. The largest city park. It is a beautiful place of grass, flowers, statues and paths. It was a nice place to try to stay awake! We stayed for about 30 minutes until the Guarda (police) asked us to leave as the park was closing. Another part of our Dublin experience has been bar hopping (pretty funny for two non-drinkers) on Temple Bar street and found ourselves a leprechaun. Can you find him too? * Clue: He may be hiding in the park as well.

Hill of Tara

I was personally excited --perhaps one of the few on the bus. Remember, Liam didn't really give us much to go on about the places we were visiting. No one knew what this place was-- to visit the Hill of Tara. My sister brought me home some soil from the hill from her time in Ireland as a souvenir in a beautiful glass vase years ago. I have wanted to visit personally ever since finding out it existed.

No one is really sure what the Hill of Tara was really used for, but tradition says it was the seat of the High Kings of Ireland. The hill of Tara was at the height of its power as a political and religious center in the early centuries after Christ. The hill has an air of romance and mystery. To the right of the hill lies a beautiful old church building that now serves as a visitor center (though closed at the time of visit.)
At the summit of the hill, to the north of the ridge, is an oval Iron Age hilltop enclosure that is enclosed by an internal ditch and external bank, known as Ráith na Ríogh (the Fort of the Kings, also known as the Royal Enclosure). The most prominent earthworks within are the two linked enclosures, a bivallate ring fort and a bivallete ring barrow known as Teach Chormaic (Cormac's House) and the Forradh or Royal Seat. In the middle of the Forradh is a standing stone, which is believed to be the Lia Fáil (Stone of Destiny) at which the High Kings were crowned. According to legend, the stone would scream if a series of challenges were met by the would-be king. At his touch the stone would let out a screech that could be heard all over Ireland. To the north of the ring-forts is a small Neolithic passage tomb known as Dumha na nGiall (the Mound of the Hostages), which was constructed around 3,400 (cal.) BC.
So now you know all that the brochure told me about the Hill of Tara. Personally, I believe it to be a must see for all ladies named "Tara", don't you?

Mellifont Abbey

Next stop on the Boyne Valley tour after Monsasterboice, Mellifont Abbey. Another round of religious ancient ruins from 1142 a.d. This particular monastery introduced the European monastic way of life to Ireland. Granted-- all of this information is from the brochure. Our tour guide, Liam, was very funny, very sweet and not terribly informative. We just kind of pulled up, got off the bus, wandered around and took photos for an hour. If we wanted to know anything, we really had to read the signs. He was hilarious. He was older (perhaps in his 70's), and would ramble on about the same facts over and over. He also was getting a cold and would cough loudly into the bus speaker as he was talking. He had a thick Irish brogue and you just couldn't help but giggle with the old man.

Monasterboice

Our first full day in Ireland was spent touring the Boyne Valley.
Our first stop were the ruins of an ancient monastery built in the 14th Century, called Monasterboice. It was an interesting mix of a more modern graveyard and the ruins of that ancient monastery.
The main draw to the ruins are the remains of the tower which they believe was the treasury for the monastery. It was leaning quite a bit and may not last much longer.
The number of religious sites and ruins are astounding. It seems like every block has a different cathedral or ruin or other such link to religion. I forget how powerful the religions were and how closely tied to history and goverments of the world.

Comic Books are Universal

We have been walking around Dublin a lot in the past two days. The following two pictures are love letters to our children back at home. Comic Books are an international phenomenon. Thinking of you guys!