I think I've mention, about 47 times, that we live in pretty tight quarters.  A small two bedroom apartment with, thankfully, a terrace and small "garden".  When the weather is warm enough we can move outside but now that it's autumn we a restricted to our 900+ square feet.  So entertaining more than a couple is pretty tough.  Tomorrow night Grace has 5 friends coming for at least the night and possibly the weekend.  There is a new girl added to the already interesting group of 5.  This one has just arrived from Australia and has a strange resemblance to Grace.  That is 6 very long legged 15 year old girls in this place.  I don't know how to feed them or how to sleep them.  This will be interesting.  Italians don't do sleepovers and in fact friends, once past puberty, don't often go to each others houses.  They meet places.  And do stuff.  I'm thinking GP and I may have to take a nice long walk in the city tomorrow night.  Or lock ourselves in our room.  There's only so much teen angst I can handle.  Only so many hours of "One Direction" I can listen to.  If you are not the mother of a teen girl they are the current "Beatles", talent excluded.  They only have the "cute" factor.  And in fact they are adorable but I'll stop now so as not to sound like a dirty old lady.  I want no comments about that!  Wish me luck.  xxoo me

Main Entrance

One of the many Irish Sweets Shops that we had to visit

The usurped cemetery and gravestones

Friday was Halloween and the partying started early.  People were already dressed when we left the hotel in the morning.  The Irish take their festivities very seriously.  The day was dedicated to the justifiably famous Dublin Zoo.  It was great.   The zoo is located in Phoenix Park, one of  the largest urban parks in Europe.  We saw rhinos arguing, giraffes chewing their tongues and lions doing things that should only be done behind closed doors.  Grace didn't think it was amusing when I yelled, "Cover the children's eyes!".  I thought it was very funny as did the various Irish parents with their 5 children each.  Man these people are prolific!  The park is a couple miles from the center of Dublin and the zoo itself is so big it takes a few hours of walking to see it, so with all that exercising we were ready for an afternoon rest.  We had lunch in a lovely little restaurant where GP and I the best Irish Stew and Grace a leek and goat cheese tart.  I'm hungry just thinking about it.  When we went in it was sunny, when we went out it was pouring.  That seems to be Irish weather.  They say you get all 4 seasons in one day and how right they are.  We were alternating between hot sunshine, autumn winds and pouring rain; either too warm or too cold.  That night we wandered the center and people watched.  We saw lots of naughty nurses and maids and an enormous number of vikings.  I had wanted to visit a famous cemetery where many Irish writers were buried, (it seemed so Halloween-y),  but it has become a skater's park and the church beside it is an Italian restaurant.  The gravestones are now all piled up against a wall of the park.  Seems very disrespectful to me and not very Catholic!  I do wonder where the bodies have been moved to?
Saturday, our last day, we went to a little local craft market and then headed out to see Ireland's shining star, the Guinness Brewery.  It covers something like 65 acres of the city.  We didn't go in the museum but just wandered around the perimeters, (for ages), and breathed in that lovely scent of beer belch.  By this time Grace had given up on us and was happily ensconced in the hotel and refused to walk another mile.  So we compromised  and spent the late afternoon in the main shopping district.
We flew out early Sunday morning and were back in time to do 3 loads of laundry and go to bed early.  Dublin was fun and definitely worth a visit but, unlike so many places, I won't feel the need to return.  Next time I go to Ireland I want to see the countryside and the sea.  In April maybe?  xxoo me

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