In Dublin's Fair City

After a long overnight flight with no sleep, we picked up the rental car and headed straight to our airbnb. Our host greeted us bright and early (christening my broken-armed boyfriend "The One-Armed Man") and sat down with us to tell us everything we needed to see in Dublin, plus he drove us to the train station so we wouldn't be worried about driving (on the left side of the road for a change) and finding parking in Dublin with no sleep.

I cannot stress enough that you should not spend more than a day or two in Dublin on your trip to Ireland. Apparently a lot of people try to plan a full 5 day trip around Dublin, and they miss out on all the amazing things the rest of the country has to offer. We had a great time in Dublin, but I think we could have done everything we wanted to do there in 2 days' time. I prioritized the rest of the country, so we were out of there after a day with some great experiences under our belts (and we spent one more night there later to watch step dancing at Murray's Bar). A lot of people want to go to Ireland for the atmosphere/the pubs, and I guess there's no other experience like walking through a city of homeless people and drunks at night (we literally saw 4 homeless people fighting each other in the street), but I think I'll pass next time!

The weather was pretty nice in Dublin and gave us an unrealistic expectation for the future. It was raining off and on and it was almost 70 degrees outside. We actually saw the sun! It was a nice day to go to St. Stephen's Green, a park our host had recommended going to (since nothing else was open yet). It was a pretty park, and I'd read that it was a nice place to go, but this would not have been at the top of our list. It's one of the few free things to do in Dublin and had some interesting statues, although there are many other cool statues in Dublin, like those we saw of Molly Malone or James

Joyce. (Side note- if you're traveling with children and want to see the Molly Malone statue, be careful. Situated across from a bar, there's a strong possibility you will see some perverted drunks doing inappropriate things to poor Molly!) It also seemed like everywhere we turned at the park there were coats and sleeping bags on the ground for the homeless people who lived there. When I was googling it before we went I saw a picture of a bunch of syringes in the park... do with that what you will.

Since we arrived so early, nothing else had really opened yet. We moseyed around the park, through Trinity College's campus (which was beautiful), and into the courtyard area around Dublin Castle. Then we headed down to the GPO (General Post Office) for its opening at 10am. I love Irish history and have read a lot about the Irish Rebellion, so I was excited to see this place, and see the bullet holes in the wall from the Easter Rising. We booked tickets for this ahead of time (it was 12 euro when we went). We only gave ourselves 1 hour to go through the museum, but there was a lot of information to take in in one short visit, even with an audio guide. If this is a priority for you, you may want to give yourself more than an hour to read everything and really get the full experience.

After the GPO, we walked down to The Winding Stair. This is a cafe connected to a bookstore, named after a famous Yeats poem. We didn't end up eating at the cafe, but I loved the atmosphere in the bookstore. Afterwards, we went to the Temple Bar Food Market, which is only open on Saturdays, so we were in luck. It's a small market, but there were some interesting choices of fresh foods/pastries- some of which we were afraid to try (oyster and duck… we are very picky eaters)- and we got to sit around and eat in the rare nice weather outside. The food was a little pricey for a food market, but it was still better on our wallets than The Winding Stair would have been.

We went on 2 tours in Dublin that we really enjoyed. The first was the Irish Rock n Roll Museum Tour (this was 16 euro booked ahead of time). We got to see tons of albums that were recorded at the recording studio, lots of guitars played by famous musicians, and they even had a whole wall dedicated to Michael Jackson. (… this may have been a bit of a stretch to find someone other than U2 to talk about!)

Afterwards, we took a bus to Kilmainham Gaol. It is quite a walk away from the Temple Bar area and we had to have help from the bus driver- we didn't have enough coins to get there and he was nice enough to charge us for 2 children's tickets instead! I think he felt bad for my boyfriend, the foreigner with a broken arm wrapped in a garbage bag, trying to get 3km away in the rain. Kilmainham Gaol (8 euro booked in advance) was a jail where leaders of the Irish Rebellion were imprisoned and later executed. The tour was phenomenal- one of our favorites- and we toured the whole facility, saw the prisoners' cells, and saw where they were executed. It sounds gruesome, but it was without a doubt one of our favorite things we did in Dublin, maybe even all of Ireland.

For dinner, we had planned on going to The Brazen Head, Ireland's oldest pub... on a Saturday night when the Champion's League was going on, we couldn't even get into the building. Tottenham and Liverpool were playing, and all the Irishmen were in the pubs rooting on their "fellow countrymen" when that whole day they had been shouting on our tours, "Pah, England! The enemy!"

Because of the crowds, we went to the pub we were to meet at for the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl (about 14 euros) and munched on some chips (aka potato wedges) that were way overpriced (to be expected in a big city like Dublin). The "pub crawl" was such an entertaining experience, and it's more of a walking tour and theater in disguise. I don't drink myself (which makes it kind of weird that I wanted to spend an evening in Dublin of all places, right?), but I went on the pub crawl solely for the entertainment and had a blast! They would reenact famous scenes from plays or books and take us to various spots featured in Irish literature.

We left the pub crawl a little early so that we could catch our train and be able to get up early the next morning. I think when it's late at night the trains don't run as much, so you have to get off at certain stops and switch (it was so confusing). When we saw the destination of the train and realized it was before our stop, an Irish family overheard us and offered to help. They were so friendly and we honestly may have been wandering the streets all night if it hadn't been for them!

Total costs for Day 1 (Dublin): ~95 euros per person

Cost of airbnb: $84