Dublin Post 1: Touring, Saturday-Monday (before Worldcon)

[chomiji]

As promised!

Saturday, August 10 - Arrive after a rather horrid flight on the official airline of the little nation next to Greenland. We won't be using them again, I'm afraid: packed in like sardines, separated from the Mr. despite having selected seats next to each other when we bought the tickets, and the plane was just too hot for me. Kudos to the stewardess who kept bringing me cups of ice, but I didn't sleep a wink on the flight to Keflavik. After a brief ride in a very crowded airport shuttle bus, we arrived at our hotel, the Spencer, which was mostly quite nice. Most important at that moment, it had a BED and a window that opened. And they had got us a little cube fridge, as we requested. We spent the rest of the day fetching distilled water (for my CPAP) from the pharmacy on Mayor Square (around the corner from the hotel), healthy snacks (fruit, nuts, yogurt) from a little grocery nearby, and eating sushi (!) for dinner, then took a stroll along the River Liffey (our hotel was right across the street from the river shore).

River Liffey in Dublin with Samuel Becket Bridge, Jeanie Johnson tall ship, and Dublin Convention Center (on left).

Sunday, August 11 - Our first experience with the bountiful hotel breakfast: eggs (either scrambled on the buffet or poached or fried to order), black and white puddings (not to my taste, but traditional), delicious bacon, sausages, porridge, fruit salad, meats and cheese, rolls, etc. The only things I didn't like about it were the fact that the OJ was pretty obviously canned (or equivalent modern packaging) and there were no berries of any kind (better for me than most other fruits).

Dublin Comic Con was occupying the Convention Center, so we bought day passes and did a little shopping in the dealers room. There was a stand selling donuts, which are very trendy in Dublin at the moment.

The donuts at Comicon Con. Very very GOOD donuts.

Then we walked across the Liffey on one of the many bridges and went to the Museum of Archeology, which has lovely exhibits of goldwork etc. But most of my pictures did not come out very well:

A pile of gold bracelets, ready for a chief to hand out to his warriors etc.: impressive but not all that beautiful.

We had tea at the museum about halfway through, and we exhausted afterward, so we let Google Maps find us a nearby restaurant, which turned out to be Italian: Dunne and Crescenzi, pretty good.

Monday, August 12 - This was my birthday. We took the Luas (tram) out into the suburbs to Richmond Barracks, which was the military center for the British occupation through the start of the 20th century and is now a museum. We attended a lecture that the Mr. wanted to hear, and then had lunch (mine was pretty inedible for me - a baked potato stuffed with what turned out to be mostly peppers). One of the museum staff recommended the Dublinia museum back in town, so we went there next. It was a fun, kid-friendly installation on viking and medieval Dublin. We had a very nice tea nearby at Queen of Tarts. The weather was showery and we were very footsore, so we went back to the hotel after that and ate leftovers from the previous night's dinner.

Luas tram arriving in Mayor Square, which became our center of operations.

One of the many life-size dioramas at Dublinia.

Tea at Queen of Tarts. I have a gluten-free lemon cake, and the Mr. has a rustic apple tart with crumb topping

OK, that took longer than expected, More tomorrow.

Comments

[isis]

Donuts! They look awesome!

[theskywasblue]

I always think it's funny that some of the best parts of travel is the food. When my sister went to Berlin I swear she took more picture of food than anything else!

[hamsterwoman]

The donuts do look impressive!

And the pile of bracelets looks familiar, I think...