Dublin - Ireland Day 1

After a very difficult exam Friday, a friend and I flew to Dublin, Ireland Friday night for a weekend away.

We arrived in Dublin around 10pm, checked into our hostel and then decided to go out for a walk.  We walked about the Temple Bar area.  It is essentially a few blocks of wall to wall bars and pubs.  When we walked through it around 10:30 there were people everywhere and the streets were packed. Clearly the place to be on a Friday night.

View from my hostel bed

The next day we got up quite early and started touring around Dublin.  Our first stop was the Samuel Beckett Bridge.  It was designed to look like a harp, the national symbol of Ireland.

Our next stop was Trinity College.  We walked around the outside of the campus for a while.  We then decided to pay to enter the Book of Kells exhibit and look at the Old College Library.  The Book of Kells is from the 9th century and is an intricately decorated copy of the four Gospels of Jesus.  Random fact: It took 185 calf skins to make the Book of Kells.  The detail that went into making the book was incredible.  And the library was stunning.  It may have been my favourite stop of the whole trip.

Trinity College 

Trinity College Courtyard

The Old Library

The Old Library

The Old Library

The weather on Saturday was very rainy.  So after Trinity College we decided to grab some food and head back to the hostel to try and dry up a bit.  Once we finished we headed back out with the plans of going to look at two different churches.  That's when things got interesting.  As we were walking from our hostel toward the turn off that headed in the direction of the church, we noticed a ton of police followed by a huge number of people.  It turns out we managed to end up in the middle of a protest!  Throughout history, Irish citizens haven't had to pay for water, but now they do.  So this was a protest against the water charge ahead of their upcoming election next week.  My friend and I watched for a bit with the assumption that the line of people would come to an end fairly quickly.  But boy were we wrong!  After a while we gave up and ended up having to cut through the protesters to get where we wanted to go.  Good thing we didn't try and wait them out because they estimate there were 20 000 people marching!

Following the police ahead of the protestors

Here they come!

St Patrick's Cathedral

After our church exploration we headed to Dublin castle to look around.

Dublin Castle

Dublin Castle Gardens

After looking around the outside of the castle we headed towards the main shopping street.  That's when we ran into the protest again.  But this time, it was the final meeting place where they were listening to speeches so we ended up having to walk the long way around them because there was no way through.  We then strolled through St Stephen's green, stumbled across the famous Doors of Dublin and finished our touring with an impromptu stop at the Irish Natural History Museum.  

All the doors along the street had unique plaster work and
were painted many different colours

After our long day of walking we were very tired.  According to my friend's phone we walked almost 18km over the course of the day.  So for dinner we found a nice pub that seemed to be pretty popular with the locals and a little less touristy.  We both did the proper Irish thing and had a pint of Guinness with our irish meals, Lamb Stew and Shepherd's Pie.  It was a nice finish to a very full day.

I will post about our Sunday Ireland adventures in another post!