Day 1 in Dublin

We arrived very early into Dublin, where I thought that I would get a stamp in my passport. I was wrong there wasn’t any security off the train and we walked right into the Republic of Ireland, it was as easy as that. Walked straight for O’connelly street since it was the high street and it is always best to get to know your bearings from the centre of the city if possible. It was too early to check in so we bought another bus tour ticket where we could hop on and hop off so it served as a tour and a bus to all the sights like the one in Belfast. There was the city sightseeing bus tour in Dublin but we went local and got the green bus.

The green bus came in two forms, the live commentary and a multilingual bus with recorded commentary and headphone sockets to play it in various languages. Although these multilingual buses were according to the timetables half as common as the main buses, we seemed to get one every time early on. Our first bus took us across the river Liffey to Trinity College, the oldest university off mainland Europe which was ordered by Elizabeth I because she was sick of her brightest students being shipped off to colleges in Europe and coming back with ideas about heathen practises and such. The college is really old and has a massive old library room, where the main treasure is the Book of Kells. This is an ancient, annotated and beautifully decorative edition of the gospels; we had heard of it from the film ‘The Secret of Kells’ which we absolutely recommend watching, so it was cool to see in person. It costs 9 Euro to get into the library, but you can get a walking tour with library ticket included for 10 Euro, which we did and learnt all sorts of history about the college, such as how the main on-campus accommodation is the worst student housing in history ever, or the story of the students who had a shoot-out with their teacher after a few drinks one night. Definitely worth 1 Euro. You do still have to queue to enter the library though.

Who stacks their books from largest to smallest?

Leaving Trinity College the weather turned to a massive hailstorm, so we got back on the first green bus and rode it around to Temple Bar. This area used to be old docklands but was regenerated about 20 years ago and is now a hub for music and culture in Dublin. We wandered around for a bit and met a nice guy called Sam that worked for Amnesty.

Following that we got back on the bus and got a live commentary at last and got a full tour of Dublin. We learnt about the history of some of the people who are now buried in Christchurch and St. Patrick’s cathedrals (namely a douche called Strongbow and Jonathon Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels), passed the Guinness Storehouse which we had decided to save until tomorrow, saw the old city gaol and went out to Pheonix Park, the biggest enclosed park in Europe. The bus was massively held up in traffic and so running very late, our driver took out his frustrations about this on the roundabout in the park, going around it twice and holding up the red bus. It was as hilarious as his commentary.

After the park we passed by the Jamesons distillery and a couple of museums before successfully completing the loop around back to O’Connelly Street. Now we were able to go and check in at Globetrotters Hostel, much to the surprise of the man at the reception desk who had no idea we were coming. Apparently the lady who answers the emails (we booked with Hostelbookers) had not been in, and so we got a free upgrade to a private double room for our first night. Can’t complain there (though we could grumble about the lack of hot water, nasty coffee and non-functional TV, but they’re only mini grumbles). Time to rest since we had such a long day.