Travel report 1

Traveled to Dublin in late March and to England in early April... here are two brief reports, first from Dublin.

I went with 30 colleagues on a Fri-Mon trip to Dublin, and had a blast. Dublin's no London, but it's still a very nice place to visit. Spring had arrived (unlike in Norway at the time), this pic is from a nice little park called St. Stephen's Green. The only thing not so nice was that they had some sort of resident drunk at the entrance, and he seemed to take a particular dislike to me when I stopped to look at the map of the park posted on the other side of the road from his bench. I toyed with the very, very tempting idea of breaking his nose and kicking him comatose, but since I had two colleagues with me, I behaved. Anyways, 'twas a purdy lil' park:




In several streets the houses had very brightly painted doors. According to a tour guide this was an old device meant to help dead drunk inhabitants to find the correct door. A bit tacky, but it also put some color to the city.




We managed to get in some real Irish culture. On Sunday we lunched at the Brazen Head, which claims to be Ireland's oldest pub. They had live music of a very high quality, good ole footstompin', singalong stuff!




We had dinner Sunday at a very good place, the Ryan's pub & restaurant in Parkgate. Great food, though their spelling could improve:




During the dinner I was presented with a gift, as an appreciation of my efforts (I'd organized the whole trip - plane tickets, dinners, lodgings, etc). It may not be apparent from this picture, but this bearded hat is so big it actually rests on my shoulders when I put it on...



I would also like to recommend the hotel we stayed at, the Best Western Ashling. Despite the fire alarm that went off at 5AM Sunday morning, we had a thoroughly enjoyable stay there. On Sunday night (more like early morning) they even opened up the bar area for us to have our private little party in. High Five!