My busy day… Dublin bus, art and food
So myself and the ladyfriend went off to spend the day doing stuff in Dublin. It was pretty interesting, and good enough fodder for a blog post – so enjoy it with me as I badly recollect the events.
It starts early, as she has a morning meeting. As a show of support she drags me out of bed to be moral support, where I sit in the companies’ canteen and enjoy some coffee while working on my final year dissertation. 1,500 words later, meeting adjourned and we move on!
We drive back home to drop the car off and head into the city on the bus. For any Americans reading this, out moderately reliable public transport is a typically useful way of traversing a city. No, really!
First port of call is lunch at about 1PM, which on a Monday is always a disaster as everything is busy. We luck out by getting a table in the vegetarian place “Cornucopia”. Beautiful food, but pricey. Two meal deals, water and orange juice should never, ever come to €30, especially in a deli-like spot. Yes it’s kitch, cool and the food tastes lovely (and they know how to pile it on, too), but in a world where the biggest work movement in the country are the unemployed, you have to adjust. Having said that, the food was fantastic and there was a consistent queue for the 40-odd minutes we spent inside.
Next we decided to go over to the tourist information center in the city, which normally helps visitors to Dublin with planning their tourism activities. Bus tours and the like. We asked about theatre, performance or comedy that might be on this evening, but nothing too late. Sadly, the International Bar let us down with an improv night, but at 9PM. Too late, which is surprising because usually they’ve something good on a little earlier.
WBY gallery is great
So we decided to head on down to Kildare Street, which has the Irish house of parliament and a few other important buildings, like the Royal College of Physicians, or something. We headed into the national museum to see the WB Yeats exhibition (which, I believe, is permanent) downstairs. Free entry and wonderful to see. It’s a shame I’m not doing my leaving cert. now because that was genuinely interesting and informative.
It was relatively quiet, which is probably not a good thing but considering it was a random Monday that we both had free to go and roam around. Not many tourists either, the one or two other people pottering about were Irish. Either historians checking the exhibit out, or people like us who never knew it was there!
Next we wandered down to the national gallery on the other side of the Dail, but it’s closed on Monday sadly!
National Gallery is an absolutely amazing building - and has nother building inside it!
As a consolation we moved on down to the wonderful National Gallery. Inside they’re housing a huge collection of Irish and European artworks as well as a current run of some selected works by Munch, including the infamous “Scream”. It was interesting to say the least. Some of Munch’s work is great, particularly dark themed ones where he does interesting things with eyes. The rest didn’t capture my imagination that much, if I’m honest. But, it being Monday – it was free! Well worth it, to say the least.
So, after spending a few hours enjoying some art and free attractions around the city, we decided to move on. We still weren’t hungry after our big lunch, but hunger was starting to set in. To celebrate our successful day, as it was getting dark, we headed down to Grafton St. to check out the shopping. No joy there so it was time to do something typical – drink. Cheap cocktails in Captain Americas is always fun, so we headed up but the bar was full of what looked like 15 year olds drinking cider, but the smell of food got to us. A bit more rambling and we ended up going back to avail of the cheap lunch menu. My burger/chips combo was fine, and the Miller bottle went down well – but her vegi burger wasn’t as nice. Also, €10 for a deal is fine and all, but we would have enjoyed Gourmet Burger far more. Don’t think I’ll re-visit any time soon.
So, we head on home and after some vegetating in front of the TV (or, well Playstation 3 browser streaming episodes of the US Office on the TV) we roll up the road to Spar to get two bottles of wine and some snacks to top off a nice, fairly stress-free weekend where we managed to see a lot on Monday. Great day.
My point here? Do go see the attractions around the cities of Ireland. We spent very little on the good stuff but ended up going a bit overboard on the food side of things – as is typical. Seeing Munch’s world famous “Scream” cost nothing, but a nice vegetarian lunch managed to rack up €30 for two people.
