Bars and Castles

Well the weather decided to cooperate for us at least for a little bit Saturday and all of Sunday. On Saturday we went downtown and saw some of the sights, we went to Merrion Square, the Art Museum, the Natural History Museum and Grafton St. Merrion Square is a park located by Trinity College and its pretty nice it has some statues and other sculptures in it (the picture of the guy is Oscar Wilde). The Museums are well......museums they are cool but nothing to really write about. Grafton St however comes out of nowhere and is ridiculously busy, it is Dublin's main shopping street and it has a lot of high end shops on it as well as 3 malls and tons and tons of other shops, pubs, etc. In 2008 Grafton St was the fifth most expensive shopping street in the world so that gives you an idea of how busy it can get. We also saw the statue of Molly Malone who is a popular figure in Irish culture apparently she made her living by selling fish but as Gary (our new Irish friend from the lab) so elegantly put it "You can't make that much money selling fish, so we all know what she was really selling". As for the nightlife well yeah its pretty much the coolest, Hong Kong was good, really good, but it doesn't touch Dublin (as expected). As we walk into the first pub we went to "Enter Sandman" by Metallica was playing and I knew that we were in for a good night. The best part about the pubs were that each bar was appropriately staffed and you never had to wait to get a beer it was great. Having a few personal tour guides was pretty nice to as they took us to 4 different places all of which had excellent music selections; we went to The Foggy Dew, The Globe, Hogan's (no relation to Hulk) and Captiol Lounge. So our first Saturday in Dublin went very well.

Now onto Sunday, after waking up nice and early (yeah that's a lie) we went up the coast to Malahide and visited the Malahide Castle, it was awesome the castle grounds are 250m acres and its just a bunch of wide open fields it was really nice, everything here is still so green it looks like spring in the good ole' WV. We then traveled down to Howth to get a bite to eat and we found that they set up a market on Sunday and it is full of delicious foods and deserts (Lebanese, Greek, Indian, German and traditional Irish foods to name a few) so that will probably become a Sunday ritual for us. I don't know if it was the fact that the sun was actually out or that it was Sunday but the towns were booming there were people everywhere and absolutely nowhere to park, which normally is not an issue. Sundays might just be the day to hit the streets here in sunny Ireland. To all the facebookers there are a bunch of pictures on there to look at and for everyone else I'll look into finding a way to share pics with you too. Well there is plenty of work to do tomorrow so i had better get to bed.