The Dubliners

So we haven't been so good about blogging on Dublin... It's been busy. Mark's started at work, of course, and the first wee while for me was spent treading the streets of Dublin trying to find a place to live. It was a good way to get to know the city actually, where you'd want to live, where you wouldn't, where the grocery stores are etc. We eventually found a really beautiful apartment which was ready to move into on the day our short-term apartment had to be vacated. Win win.

So, now we are all set up (apart from the broadband... which may take up to 25 working days...!) in our lovely inner-city apartment. We have the entire second floor of a Georgian apartment building, with spare room. Guests welcome. Although we are booked up for the next couple of weeks.

In between the flathunting, establishment of personal infrastructure (which mostly involves endless tussles with Vodafone) and the all-important search for a Capitol in our new capital, we have managed to see a bit of Dublin. We're trying to keep some of the really good stuff for later, when we have visitors (Trinity College, Guinness Storehouse). One major touristic highlight (although it's not really a tourist attraction, more of a local Dublin kiddies' attraction) is the Natural History Museum, known in local parlance as The Dead Zoo. It's a museum of a museum, if you can imagine that. Basically, imagine what an exotic animal museum would have looked like in the 1800s - thousands of stuffed and mounted animals, complete with little plaques telling you who shot it and where. Then imagine what it would look like if it were in Harry Potter. A massive, massive room, just filled with taxidermied animals (not very PC, but these animals were victims of the last century and surely it's worse for them to have died in vain?). It's actually four levels tall - with mounted animal heads the whole way up - kind of like what the Otago Museum Animal Attic looked like when I was little, before they modernised it, except it's about fifty times bigger. It sounds awful, but it is truly one of the most incredible rooms I have ever walked into - and they have both an aye-aye and a mouse lemur. I wish that I was still four years old, because I can only imagine how much greater the effect would be if you were three feet tall and looking up at it. There was a gaggle of tiny boy scouts marching around when we were there - I looked at what one of them was writing on his work-sheet. It said 'It is really really cool.' I concurred. And even better, it's free entry and about one minute's walk from our house.

We also visited the Taioseach's (Prime Minister's) office and Cabinet room. A really great (also free) tour of the government buildings (see below), where you actually get to go into Enda Kenny's actual office. I was concerned about the stress for poor Enda Kenny having to tidy away all of his papers every Friday before public tours on a Saturday, but the Irish government is apparently an award winner for being an e-government... yup, pretty much paperless. I had some concerns about security, but was assured by our tour guide that it is all very safe. It was an excellent tour - we're very impressed by Irish tour guides. It seems to us that every tour guide must be an actual historian, they give great detailed, historical fact-packed tours (just the way we like them) and they seem to be able to respond to pretty much everything you ask them. For example, after an absolutely brilliant tour around Dublin Castle from Daragh, our very able tour guide, I cornered him to ask him about women's rights in Ireland during the War of Independence and the establishment of the Republic afterwards. He was off and away - he pretty much wrote me a thesis right there and then. You get the feeling the tour guides live for those left-field questions so they can really flex their history muscles. 

Peter, our tour guide at Kilmainham Jail, was no different. Kilmainham Jail, along with the Dead Zoo, has probably been one of our two touristic highlights so far. Kilmainhaim Jail was built in the 1860s and operated through until 1910, and then was used off and on during the 1910s and early 1920s to house, and execute, Republican activists. Pretty much all of the big names in the struggle for Irish independence have found themselves here, including Patrick Pearse, Robert Emmet and (my personal favourite) the kick-ass Countess Markiewicz. Sadly, most of them were also executed here. Many Irish people, including children as young as 5, found themselves here during the Great Famine of 1845-1850, as poverty drove people to petty crime just to try and survive. It's a pretty dreary and cold place, but the 'New Wing', added in the 1890s (I think), is strangely pretty. It has a massive glass roof (so the prisoners could look to God to put them on a path away from their criminal ways) and iron cage work everywhere - a huge open space with cells on the sides so that prisoners could be easily viewed. It's been well preserved and is pretty much exactly as most prisons of the era would have looked, and as a result has been used in many movies, including the original Italian Job as well as In The Name of The Father. 

Also worthy of an honourable mention is Dublinia - the Museum of Dublin's Viking and Medieval history. You get to try on a chainmail hat.

Of course, sightseeing isn't just about tourist spots when you're trying to set up a new life in a place you've never been before. Much of my time is spent hunting out the best supermarket for good deals (Dunnes on Henry Street), the best place to buy those little things you need for a new house, like teatowels (Penney's, also on Henry Street), finding the local movie theatre and trying to find a good coffee (that is probably a whole post all on its own).

It has started getting dark early now - on Sunday evening we were wandering home at 4:30pm. It was already dark, but the weather has been fairly mild. A warm jacket and a scarf and you're fine. The Christmas lights are up, and in the middle of town, with the wee windy streets and pretty old-fashioned frontages, it's  a really beautiful walk. We may feel differently when the temperature plummets and the, as yet, absent Irish rain starts up.