Dublin

I was sad to leave Liverpool this morning. We’ve really enjoyed our time there. I took the photo below of the town hall as I waited in the street with our luggage for Rod to bring the car around. The town hall is only a couple of hundred metres from our hotel in Castle Street, once the site of Liverpool Castle. We drove out to John Lennon Airport and dropped off our hire car, then wheeled our luggage over to the terminal, passing a yellow submarine on the way. I wonder if that’s the best they could do. C’mon, surely John Lennon deserves better than that. There were very few people on our Ryanair flight to Dublin. It took off four minutes early and landed twenty minutes before the scheduled time – a 39 minute flight. We had moderately blue skies upon arrival, but that was soon to change.

After checking in to our hotel mid-afternoon, Rod, Cornelia and I walked down O’Connell Street and crossed the Liffey to reach Temple Bar. The Dublin Portal is just near our hotel. Today it seems to be providing a live interactive video stream to a portal in Philadelphia, USA. We saw people on the other side wandering up, smiling, waving, then walking away. It seemed to bring smiles to people’s faces. We walked past the famous Dublin GPO, where, on Easter Monday 1916, Irish republicans took over the Post Office and proclaimed a Free Ireland. They were holed up in there for several days until they were forced to surrender to British troops. The last time I was in Dublin, our bus drove slowly past while our tour director pointed out the bullet holes in the columns that still remain. This building has huge significance in the story of Ireland’s battle for independence.

Temple Bar is a busy, popular spot near the Ha’penny Bridge over the River Liffey that is well known for its bars, restaurants and live traditional Irish music venues. We popped into a couple of pubs, but didn’t stop for a drink on this occasion as we were planning to return to our hotel shortly to meet up with Marg and go somewhere for dinner. The pubs looked great though. They were vibrant places, packed with patrons enjoying the live music and what the Irish refer to as ‘the craic’, or what we might call ‘the ‘a good time’. There was an impressive lineup of whiskies behind the bar in the original Temple Bar. I hope we have another chance to explore Temple Bar and stop in somewhere for a drink before we leave Dublin.

By the time we headed back the way we came, the blue skies had deserted us. Grey clouds rolled in and there was a chilly wind blowing down O’Connell Street. We had a few drops of rain. We passed a few statues of some of the heroes of the Irish fight for independence from Britain. No doubt we’ll hear more of their stories in the coming days. We also passed the Spire of Dublin, a huge pointed stainless steel needle that seems to keep going up and up into the air. It’s 120 metres tall and you obviously can’t miss it. I’m yet to learn if there is a meaning to it or if it’s simply a work of art. I was surprised to find a green post box marked with the insignia of England’s King Edward VII. He died in 1910, so it’s a very old post box. But I would have thought all things denoting the British crown would have been removed after 1922, when the Irish Free State was formed. Apparently not. I guess the Irish thought it was still a useful object, so they painted it green, naturally, and kept using it.

Tonight we found a bar called Madigan’s near our hotel and had dinner there. It was good to get inside out of the rain. The publican told us it had been badly damaged in the 1916 Easter Uprising and it took until 1919 to restore it. It’s been a bar ever since. Photos on the pub wall commemorate the Dublin writer James Joyce. There’s also a wonderful statue of him out in the street a few doors down from the bar. I never read his famous book ‘Ulysses’, but I know it tells the story of one man’s day on the streets of Dublin and is considered a very important work of Irish fiction. We stopped for a moment at the Portal, where a group of Dubliners were playing rock, paper, scissors with people in the US. There was plenty of laughter on both sides of the Portal. The rain had stopped. We headed back to our hotel.