Revolutionary Rants

Dublin was good. Very different from the capital I used to know, but good all the same. We had a nice and easy drive to Bristol and an equally easy flight to Dubbo. We were a little taken aback at paying €6 each for a one way trip on the bus, but hey, it got us to near Kinlay House, our hostel.

I used to use Kinlay a lot in my concert going days and always found it to be the safest and quietest (apart from the dormitory, which as you’d expect is rather noisy) hostel in Dublin, however this time it had also changed. It was still nice and central (naturally) and safe, but it was extremely noisy. We had a bunch of Italian blokes above us, who nightly serenaded us from about 23:00 through to 2:00 with snippets of opera and a fair bit of loud, loud chatter. The ceiling was paper thin, so it wasn’t much fun… We also had issues with our booking in, being charged too much by a disbeliving member of staff. However, another nicer one gave us our money back on Monday.

On Saturday, after checking in, we met Chicken’s school pal Poffe for a drink or two, which was cool, especially as I finally got to go in Fibber Magee’s, a pub/club I was turned away from many moon’s ago after a Manics gig. Was good.

Sunday saw us wake rather tired… Not good. We headed out to walk around St. Stephen’s Green, which was probably my favourite bit of our trip, wandering round the whole park seeing the statues and with Celtic Tiger era joggers shooting passed us. We also saw the tart with the cart in all her exposed glory. Then we went to see where Oscar Wilde lived and walked down Grafton street. We attempted to get a coffee in the famous Bewley’s, but after waiting 15 minutes with other people being served all around us we headed off for a evil capitalist but very tasty coffee across the road. Then we saw the Polish exhibition at the National Gallery and went for a late lunch a The Bistro somewhere off George Street. Vegetarian food is still not easy to get, sadly… We went back to Kinlay and fell asleep and then watched Best in Show before falling asleep again.

Most of the stuff I had planned for Monday (my favourite gallery, the Hugh Lane and the National museum) proved to be shut, which was quite disappointing. Well, we did lots of nice capitalist shopping and had a good bit of snap in a place called Bobo’s. We borrowed a DVD from the hostel, My Left Foot, which I hadn’t seen for years and that we both enjoyed. Then we got some soda bread for tea and settled in for the night.

Our flight back was a little wobbly, but fine, as was the return drive and then I headed to work for a few hours. Been busy bees since then and the move fast approaches, as does sleep… Zzzzz.

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