Dublin is London's, grubby, naughty, little brother.  Where London is all wide avenues, Georgian townhouses, gorgeous and austere museums and official buildings; Dublin is dark, wet newspaper strewn, narrow streets lined with pubs. SO MANY PUBS!  Mind you I love pubs and there really are some fabulous ones there, but how many can one city support?  Evidently a lot.  I looked this up.  There are approximately 1,100 pubs in Dublin with a population of 527,612 which makes about 1 pub for every 480 people.  That includes all the children, (lots), and all the teetotalers, (few I'm thinking).  Wow. 
Grace and I got in on Wednesday at noon after a trip of planes, trains and automobiles, (and a bus).  I didn't even give her time to check Facebook, (that's a story for another time),before dragging her out to see the sights.  We had lunch first in a great place called O'Neill's near Trinity College.  Of course it's a pub so I had to try my first beer of the trip.  It's a cool old place with many staircases and doorways leading to many little rooms for imbibing.  It looks like something out of Harry Potter.   After lunch we went to Trinity College to see the library and the Book of Kells.  I could live in that library.  It is so beautiful and it smells wonderful, like wood polish and dusty attic.  After that we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering round the town getting a feel for it.  Dublin center is quite small.  Most of the buildings are no more than four stories high and all you need to see is within a half hour walk from the "old town" center.
GP got back to the hotel in time for dinner and as Grace wasn't up for going out, (she'd rather starve and spend uninterrupted hours on-line), it was just the two of us.  GP was in Dublin for an Internet conference and so could get free beverages at various locales around the city.  To get in to these places one had to have a bracelet that identified them as a conference attendee, so being a sneaky Italian, he fashioned one for me out of the cord used for his ID tag.  He was/is supremely proud of this.  We started our evening out in Temple Bar, an area near the river (Liffey!), that looks like the French Quarter in New Orleans.  The streets are lined with Pubs and restaurants that spill out onto the sidewalks.  There is wonderful live Irish music in almost every pub and thankfully most of the streets are pedestrian because they are so clogged with revelers!  This, mind you, was a Wednesday evening in October.  The first place we went to was a gorgeous historic pub that must have once been a Victorian Men's Club.  It is 4 floors of mahogany bars and balconies looking down on the central 1st floor room.  Each floor has various seating areas with fireplaces. It was all decorated for Halloween with 3D projected ghosts flying all over the place.  Next we went to another, less upscale pub to listen to some music.  The band played traditional Irish music and we sat in a tiny cubbyhole with 2 seats drinking our beers.  We had burgers for dinner at a restaurant near-by run by an American woman.  The food was all organic, a big thing in Ireland, with a policy of "homegrown" products.  Very yummy.
On Thursday, Grace and I wandered around the Port District which is where all the money was spent when Ireland went through their short economic boom in the late '90's.  All the old warehouses were either torn down and replaced by mega modern office blocks and apartments or refurbished into shopping centers and park areas.  Unfortunately the boom didn't last and much of this area is empty.  At the same time as the building boom, the country had thousands of service jobs that needed to be filled and a lot of Eastern Europeans came over to work and stayed.  Now it seems as though half the city is from the ex Soviet Block.  I had expected to find the city packed with Chinese and Indian restaurants like in London but we saw very few.  That afternoon we visited St. Stephen's Park, Dublin Castle, and St. Patrick's Cathedral before returning and crashing in the hotel for a couple hours.  We were too tired from hours of walking to go out for dinner so we picnic-ed on Irish Cheddar, Smoked Salmon, Soda Bread and of course, beer.  Yum.  Unfortunately there were a few little hiccups with our picnic.  First GP decided to chill our beer under the cold water tap assuming that any overflow would go down the appropriate overflow drain.  But this being part of Great Britain with their infamous plumbing, the overflow drain wasn't hooked up to the drain pipe.  In fact it wasn't hooked up to any pipe.  It was only when we heard a strange splashing sound coming from the bathroom did we discover that there was an inch of water on the floor.  Oops.  Then while trying to cut the very sharp cheddar with the flimsy plastic knife we'd snatched at the supermarket, a piece of cheese flew up into the air and landed in my eye.  Never try this at home.  Cheddar stings.  So I ran into the bathroom slipping and sliding on the wet floor and started slashing water in my face when GP called me for something.  Of course I answered "I can't hear you!  I have cheese in my eye!".  It would have been better had I blinded myself with the cheddar than to have watched the show we turned on after dinner.  Only the British.  It was called "Embarrassing Medicine" and is a show about real life cases of bizarre and consequently embarrassing medical issues.  There was a man who couldn't pee and we had a nice close up of him being catheterized.  Then there was the woman whose vagina was closing up.  This is the honest to God truth.  They put her up in stirrups for the world and everybody watching BBC to see, with a doctor explaining how her lady parts were too shallow while poking her repeatedly with his rubber gloved finger to show exactly how shallow!  Grace at this point started screaming "Turn it off, turn it off!"  I did. To be continued...  xxoo me

Cheers from Dublin!

Grace in stairway of pub #1