After acquainting ourselves with the hotel yesterday, we made the decision to not eat breakfast here. The food is probably fine, but we don't want to risk it with everything else we've seen here. Instead, we walked down the street and grabbed some muffins and a mocha at Starbucks. One of my conclusions from this trip is that I am glad I was not born over here, because I am finding that I am avoiding the local food after a short vacation. Too much pub food.
Because I am actually writing this blog post a week after I got back, I can mention what I think happened at this Starbucks. During breakfast, I logged onto their free WiFi to surf the interweb. I think the only thing I did was search for sights pertinent to U2. I never intended to go out of my way to see anything, but where we are staying is so central in Dublin that I figured we had been walking sights all along. This was true, and I will get to more of this later. Shortly after logging onto this open network, someone tried to hack my google account. I learned of this after getting off of the plane on our return flight when I was trying to upload 2 hours of blogging. After I changed my passwords and ensured I was in control of my own accounts, all of the blogging that had not yet been uploaded disappeared. I was bumming. My last few blog entries (including yesterday's) are all from notes and memory.
After we finished eating, we walked across O'Connell St. to the central post office. We needed to mail Peggy's post card now that it had her zip code. I took a picture of the post office only because it had the same architect as Markree Castle. I do not see the similarities, but this is cool anyways.
After mailing the post card, we went shopping in one of Dublin's many tourist shops. We were in there for a while finishing up our trinket shopping, ensuring that relatives and coworkers were handled (we each brought a tin of shortbread cookies for the coworkers). Not wanting to carry all of this around, we made the decision to bring the loot back to the hotel, which was maybe 2 blocks away.
En route, we passed the local U2 sight that I found the most interesting. The sight I visited had everything from the houses they were born in to the pub where Larry Clayton was busted for drug possession in the late 80's. Locally, it mentioned all of the theaters on O'Connell where they have played shows or debuted movies like Rattle and Hum. However, just down the street from our hotel was something I found more interesting. Young Paul Hewson was given the nickname Bonavox by a buddy in Dublin. Disliking it at first, he warmed to it when he learned it meant "good voice" in Latin. The buddy got the name from a hearing aide store in central Dublin (see below). Obviously, he shortened this up.
At the same time I took the last picture, I turned to get a picture of the Spire looking down Talbot St.
We hung out at our hotel room for a few minutes. I used the time to buy tickets to the Gaelic Football game. So excited! I would have bought them last night, but I wanted to make sure Melissa was cool with it. It will be a later night than ideal, especially since our flight tomorrow is at 550 am and tomorrow is Ireland's spring forward day (I have to do this twice this year...). The tickets were a deal at €10 each.
We had lunch at a pizza place down the street because my travel buddy wanted to. They had pizza in the window and it looked good. I thought it tasted alright too. After lunch, we walked over the river to temple Bar. An observation of Dublin is that we really could have gotten along quite well without the buses in the city center. The walks are all short distances, and the buses are unintelligible anyways. I took a few picture of the River Liffey to prove that it exists.
Along the river, we passed the more traditional entrance to Temple Bar. Our entrance the other day when we took the bus here was more of a walk through a scary alley than this.
In Temple Bar, I got a daytime picture of the temple bar.
We walked around for a while looking for a good souvernirs for my mom. We wanted to get her something extra for all of her morning meetings with our daughter. Riley has been waking like clockwork at 4 am looking for a bottle of the good stuff, and my mom has delivered. Hopefully some of the reward here was getting to spend time with our ridiculously cute little girl, but the time in the morning probably wore things thin a bit. We did not find anything in the temple bar shops, but one of the shopkeepers pointed us to a district over by Trinity college that should have some good stuff. They especially recommended a shop called Kilkenny's.
It was a short walk. We went through a few wool shops first. We didn't see anything for my mom, but Melissa did find a nice wool hat. A side note here: we both bought our hats in York, and they were hard to find. In England, the winter hats were picked over and they were beginning to put spring items on the shelves. As a result, both of our hats are pretty atrocious. We would never wear these at home. Mine is either slightly better, or Melissa is nicer than me (likely) and hasn't said anything. Her hat, on the other hand, has earned her the nickname "Meg". As in Meg from the Family Guy. I am happy to say that she bought a cute hat today, just in time to have it not show up in any of our vacation photos. I will be happy if both of our original vacation hats don't make it back to the states.
At Kilkenny's, we found a gift for my mom. We also purchased a nice print of Sligo County for ourselves.
Feeling accomplished, we strolled back to the hotel. We needed to get some packing done, and we wanted to Skype a bit early today.
We didn't leave much time to get to the game. Croke Park was a 15-20 minute walk, and everyone we talked to told us to be there a bit early. We grabbed some burgers from MvDonalds and walked with the to the game. The snob in me hates that we keep eating at American fast food places, but they are convenient and the food here isn't that great to begin with. The walk was easy and quick. The walk was made easier by the crowd of people walking to the game. All we had to do was follow the pack once we were in the neighborhood of the stadium.
The game was a blast! The ball is like a larger volleyball. The field was a larger soccer pitch. Teams scored three points for kicking the ball into the goal and one for kicking it through the uprights. Passing was by hitting or kicking the ball. Throwing the ball is a turnover. Players can catch the ball and run with it. Like Aussie rules, they have to bounce the ball every 4 steps. No tackling is allowed, but they can check each other shoulder to shoulder. Players cannot pick up the ball directly off of the ground. They have to scoop it up with a foot. The goalie is the only player than can pick up the ball without a foot. The game is chaos, and a quick YouTube viewing of Gaelic football will get the point across better than my explanation.
In the stadium, all, signage and announcements were in Gaelic. Even the team names were the Gaelic names for the cities. The game was Cliath vs Maigh (Dublin vs Mayo). Thought the stadium sat 84,000, only 25,000 were there as it was a pre-season game. For big games, the place is packed.
In the game itself, the Dublin goalie got sent off early for a cheap shot, which forced them to play a man down for 3/4 of the game. Also, the goalie was their team captain and their backup goalie was sort of not that good.
The game ended in a tie. Dublin scored a last minute game to tie it and immediately stole the ball and missed a potential game winning one pointer. It was super exciting, though ties are like kissing your sister.
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