St Patricks Day in Dublin, March 2005

As you might imagine, Dublin was an exciting destination this weekend.
 Thousands of St. Patrick's day revelers converged on the city to
celebrate the presumed date when St. Patrick first came to Ireland and
brought Christianity with him.  Or maybe they came to drink Guinness
and run amok.  Based on our recent first hand experience, the latter
appears to be more the case.

Laura and I took Friday off, and took an early flight into Dublin.  We
were able to get into the city and check in to our hotel before the
parade started.  Through the magic of mobile phones, we managed to
meet up with Mary at the parade.


It was pretty busy, and finding a spot to watch the parade was
difficult.  People brought step ladders to see over the crowd, but I
found a nice spot on top of a post.


Some of the floats were neat and the marching bands were brave to
tough out the cold rain and hail.


Most people wore green and big over the top Guinness hats, but they
seemed to mainly be Americans/Canadians and Brits.  The Irish (those
who didn't evacuate the city for this weekend) wore clovers in their
hair, or in their lapel.

Laura wore her clovers for most of the afternoon until the cold wilted
them down to the point that they looked a little bit like sprouts.


Our room was in the O'Calaghan Alexander hotel.  It's very central ,
just north of Merrion Square, about a two minute walk from Trinity
College.  Mary and Aurilia stayed with us.  Luckily the room was
pretty big.  The built in hair dryer was ideal for warming cold feet
and socks.


Mary knew some people in Dublin, and they in turn knew other people so
we had a good group of Canadians amassed.  Rather fortuitously we
managed to find a big booth at a bar in down town Dublin.  Much
Guinness was purchased, and there was lots of chatting.


We wound up leaving early to check out the Temple Bar district and see
what kind of madness St Patties day could offer.  We weren't
disappointed (or surprised), the whole area was teaming with
merry-makers and drunken tom-foolery.  I took some great videos of
random Irish guys singing and dancing.


On the way home, something weird happened.  Laura said, "Oh my gosh,
there is a Tim Horton's".  I didn't believe her, but she pointed and
showed me a Timmies sign.  No kidding, there was a convenience store
(a "Spar") that had a little Tim Horton's at the back of it.

As far as I knew there weren't any outside of Canada and the US!  We
were flabbergasted, so we bought a couple of Boston Cream donuts and
wandered home to ponder whether this was just figment of our
imagination, or a dream come true.  The Boston Creams tasted real
enough, though maybe a little stale.

The next morning Laura and I got up earlier than everyone else and
went out for yummy Irish breakfast.

The morning paper said that there were over 400 thousand spectators
for the parade on Friday.

Then we stopped into the Natural History Museum.  Here is a picture of
me and a stuffed badger.


Then we went through Stevenson green and saw memorials for those who
died in the great potato famine in the 19th century, James Joyce and
W.B Yeats.  It looked a lot like Regent's Park in London.


Then it was up to Dublin Castle, where some bug-eyed man scared the
crud out of Laura.


We went to the Jameson Whiskey factory (just the lobby), then down to
Christ Church.  That church is apparently the church that Brams Stoker
described in Dracula.  We also saw the oldest pub in Ireland, the
Brazen Head which opened in the 1100's.


Ireland and England were playing in the Rugby Six Nations
championship.  This was "the game to watch", so we went to a friend of
a friend's place to watch it.  Because all the houses looked the same,
and we had never been to the house we were looking for, three of us
wound up walking into the wrong house.  We wandered around in their
living room until someone realized there was a problem.  We apologised
profusely on the way out, and we could hear them bolting their
deadlock behind us.

Ireland won with a spectacular tri (touch-down), and the balance of
things in Dublin were set right once again.  After such excitement
there was only one thing to do, get some cheap Chinese food and go to
another pub!


In keeping with the them of the weekend, we went back to the Brazen
Head the next day for lunch, then continued on to the Guinness factory
for a tour.  The Brazen Head was very quite at first, and there was a
Celtic band playing in the other room, then a bus-load of noisy 15
year old Canadian rugby players showed up.  We ate up and made a hasty
retreat.

The Guinness factory was huge, apparently it is the largest and oldest
brewery in Europe.  We didn't take the tour because the line up was
over an hour wait, it cost 14.50 euro, and the last thing on any one's
mind was more beer.


We then went back to Trinity College to look at one of the oldest
books in the world, the book of Kells.  I couldn't take a picture of
it for fear of being flogged by the book-nazis who guard it and forbid
all things photographic.  But I managed to sneak a picture of the old
library upstairs from it.

Last year we found the eating hall for Hogwarts in Cambridge, this
weekend we found the library!

Then the afternoon was spent in a posh cafe called "Cafe en Seine"
sipping hot chocolate and tea before meeting up with an Irish friend
of Mary and Aurilia's.


Then it was off to the airport to wait for our flight.  After our last
fiasco with sitting at the back of the plane, we sweet talked the BMI
check-in person to give us seats at the front.  They turned out to be
a first class seats, and we were literally the first people off the
plane.


The tube wasn't running when we got in, so we had a 2 hour night bus
journey to get home.  It was good practice for our early morning/late
night flights this weekend when we go to Malta!

Here are all the Dublin pictures.