There was just the slightest amount of rain falling in London, which somehow caused a thirty minute weather delay leaving the airport on Monday morning - stupid Gatwick. Just as they finished getting everyone on board the plane they announced that it would be another thirty minutes to get a runway allocated for departure, so we didn't reach Dublin until 1:30pm instead of 12:00pm.
The only way in to the city with public transport is one or two public bus routes, and the lines were huge so we just managed to make it on to the second bus before it filled up. The hotel was in the Temple Bar district, at the very end of a street but still not too far from some pubs so I was hoping the sound at night wouldn't be too bad.
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| Temple Bar. |
I had a very late lunch sitting on the Liffey River boardwalk due to all of the delays. The somewhat famous Ha'Penny Bridge running across it just alright, apparently at one time you needed to pay a "half penny" to cross it. I explored a bit more of the Temple Bar district, the streets where all really rough sharp stones which were no good at all for my sore feet. Some other sights nearby were the Christ Church cathedral and the Dublin Castle. The Dublin Castle was pretty small, there was some nice sand sculptures in the middle of the square, it didn't seem worth doing the self guided tour though.
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| Ha'Penny bridge. |
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| Christ Church cathedral. |
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| Dublin castle. |
I continued on a quick afternoon tour of the south half of the city:
- St Patrick's cathedral - much bigger than the other cathedral
- Stephens Green shopping centre - found some magnets!
- St Stephen's Green - a large park with the usual features
- A lake
- A fountain
- An arch
- A James Joyce statue!
- Grafton Street - a busy mall with mostly high-end shopping
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| St Stephen's Green. |
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| Grafton Street. |
On the way back I stopped in at Trinity College, it was very spacious with a lot of old buildings. The library was just closing so I didn't get to go inside, it is a tourist attraction of sorts on it's own as it has some old "Book of Kells" that supposedly dates back to 800 AD.
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| Trinity College. |
We tried out a place called Eddie Rockets for dinner, it was designed to be like an 1980's American diner. I got a "Nutella Deluxe" milkshake to go with the veggie burger meal, it was a significant improvement on the previous shake I had.
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| Nutella milkshake. |
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| Eddie Rocket's. |
The hotel had a deal with a gym around the corner so we had free access to use that. It was by far the strangest gym I've ever been to, it had really dim lighting and lots of expensive couches, chandeliers and red curtains - even a couple of pianos. I'm not sure exactly what they were trying to achieve with the design. One positive at least was they had TV monitors attached to most of the screens, so I was able to watch a live Premier League game at the same time - that's a much better incentive to turn up.
The hotel review:
- Decent range of TV channels but none of the best ones or sports
- No free breakfast, but a supermarket next door and a fridge in the room
- Noise from outside was less than ideal, but not too disrupting
- Room is quite small but new and clean
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