Dublin

Two weekends ago I went to Dublin for the weekend. We flew from Rotterdam to Dublin with Transavia airlines (I love cheap short flights) and arrived Friday in the mid afternoon and headed towards the city to find our hotel. My first impression was of construction and more construction and just how typical cities and towns in The UK and apparently Ireland look like compared to the Typical Dutch, French or German cities of the European continent.
After finding our hotel which was just the other side of Trinity College we dropped our bags and headed out to find a drink and have a look around and ended up at for some great home brews and burgers. And after a few samples from their menu of beers we decided to go and look for more drinks in the Temple Bar area. Which is not hard to do. We sampled the Temple Bar but got bored of waiting to be served another pint of Guinness, found our way to another bar up the street and had thought about going to Spirit later but after going back to the hotel decided to call it a night and get a early start Saturday. First impressions of the night life. Everyone is quite friendly but very drunk, loads of Hen and Stag parties and I mean LOADS down to matching hats, shirts or blinky things around their heads... Scary! And you cannot turn around without hearing U2 being played, either in pubs, bars, restaurants or wherever.
Got up reasonably early, found a decent Breakfast and after that a decent coffee and then decided on the Photography Archives and Photography gallery. Which also happened to be on the same square as the wonderful Meeting House Square market held on Saturdays. The Archive was small but quite interesting, sadly the photo exhibit was closed but his book store wasn't which was very impressive, G even picked up a Holga which he has always wanted.
After that I had read about Cow's Lane market just up the street that has apparently the best of Dublin's designers and artists, it was closed for winter.. so we decided to keep wandering, found a Oxfam bookshop and had a peek in, bought some books for really cheap and kept wandering in search of Dublin City Gallery - The Hugh Lane gallery that was in the guidebooks. Got across the river, through the retail temptations, well almost through as I had to stop at Boots for my favorite brand and hiked a hill to find the gallery closed for renovations... are you picking up a trend? So we decided to pay homage to the Guinness factory. Stupid of us for not reading instructions and ended up walking the long way to the actual Storehouse museum. But at least at the end of it and the €14.50 *BIG RIP OFF* you at least get a pint of Guinness. It was not that the factory was a waste of time but you pay less going to way more exciting places and get so much more out of it. I personally did not feel it worth the money. Then both of us exhausted decided to head back to the hotel to freshen up before finding some food and later some fun.
Our second night we finally found a place in Temple Bar that was open and not packed for food and had some Irish Stew, after we headed over to the Octagon in the Clarernce Hotel for a couple of cocktails. Check out the link if you are a U2 fan, the band own the hotel. The cocktails were very yummy and some were very expensive up to €25. After this we headed over to the Spirit night club which was highly toted by the Time Out travel guide of being something between new age and fantastic. I liked the multi level concept of different music on each level. Women in for free men have to pay €20. They had go-go dancers male and female along to the latest in Euro-(trash) trance, Mid level was R&B and lower was (IMHO) the best music, as well a chill room/ Drum & Bass. We stayed for a few beers and hours and then decided that it would be just as useful to be asleep.
Sunday was not really time for anything, just get up, ready, find breakfast then coffee, a little window shopping in the expensive department store Brown Thomas and then headacrossoss the river to the bus to take us back to the Airport.
Oh and I forgot to mention that the six nations rugby was on as well, Ireland vs Italy. There were many Italians in Dublin that weekend.
Getting back to the Hague left enough time to relax a little before meeting with Jennifer for dinner and a quick catch up before hitting the hay. A very nice weekend despite everything we wanted to see seemed to be closed up for winter, I guess it is a good excuse to get back over there at some point.