Dublin at last

Hello hello!



Now don't worry, I haven't forgotten about Rome. I just thought I should let everyone know what I'm up to at the moment, before I start heading into the past.......



As you probably guessed by the heading, I'm in Dublin. Aaaaahhhhh Dublin, city of cool summers! It has rained every day I've been here. Fan-bloody-tastic! Ok, I'm a little strange, but if I have to live through 18 months of summer I would like to at least experience some slightly cooler temperatures.



I arrived in Dublin on Saturday and I can honestly say I was happy to leave Rome. Don't get me wrong, I love Rome and will definitely be going back in the future, but I was ready to leave. I'd had enough of the heat and the tourists and it was completely different without all of my wonderful new friends there.



My flight was about 40 mins delayed leaving Rome, so we got into Dublin a little late. It was quite an entertaining flight in a lot of ways and I think it can be pinpointed to the large number of Italians on the flight. As we were starting to gather speed to take off, the woman next to me crossed herself (which was kind of worrying!). I was sitting there thinking - 'I don't need to see this'. Flying can be bad enough as it is without knowing that the person next to me is praying to some guy in the sky to keep the plane from crashing. Then the man and woman next to me (same woman from previous) started making out and giggling and I really didn't like to look to find out what else they were doing. Then when we landed the entire plane started applauding! I couldn't help thinking - 'why are you applauding? It wasn't a miracle that the plane got back onto the ground safely, this is what the pilots are paid to do'. Oh well. It provided some entertainment to the flight.



The Irish really live up to their reputation for being larrikins. I should have mentioned before that when I was boarding the plane, one of the pilots was standing outside the cockpit door. As I was standing right next to him he decided to have a chat. He wanted to know where I was sitting and when I told him he promised me it was the best seat in the house! It was my first exposure to the lovely Irish accent.



Dublin airport is a strange place. It's an odd mix of ultra-modern and 1950s. When we got off the plane we headed down long, narrow corridors with very strangely patterned carpets and it was all very old-fashioned. I couldn't help thinking that this was the domestic airport for some small country town. Then all of a sudden we emerge into a large, light, airy, all glass modern airport. It was very strange, but rather charming.



Immigration in Ireland is a lot more involved than it is in Europe. Whenever I fly into Rome a bored-looking guy behind a desk looks at my passport, looks at me and then I'm through. In Ireland I got to play 20 questions. However, the guy was very friendly and when he found out that I'd been doing a dig in Rome he was intrigued and asked me even more questions!



Getting through the airport was pretty quick. I knew the bus I needed to get me into the city and it wasn't hard to find. I had to buy my ticket on the bus and the driver was yet another character. He was giving me shit about how he could keep the change from the ticket and all sorts of other stuff.



We arrived in Dublin at the main bus station, which was only about a 10 min walk from my hostel. My hostel is in an area known as Temple Bar, which has a big bar and cafe scene and is really popular at night. The hostel is faces the river Liffey, so it's an excellent location. The hostel itself is pretty simple and the rooms are small, but it's clean and it has a kitchen and free wireless internet (that I can get in my room), so all-in-all it's not bad.



My room is on the second floor of the building and as the room is at the front of the building I have an amazing view of the river from my bed. It's rather lovely.



Not long after I arrived at my hotel it started absolutely pouring with rain. I didn't much feel like braving the elements, so I got myself set up with my laptop on my bed and just watched the rain and the people scurrying around in it. It was rather lovely.



In one of the few short dry spells I headed out to find something for dinner. On the way from the bus station I had spotted a supermarket about a 2 min walk down the street from my hostel, so I headed there to see if they had anything. It turned out that at their deli counter they cooked stiryfrys as you waited. I'd been craving Asian food for ages, so it was fantastic.



I'd decided early on that I wasn't going to rush Dublin. I've gotten so sick of spending only a couple of days in a city and seeing all of the main touristy sites and then moving on again in a rush. It's exhausting doing it that way and you don't get a proper feel for the city.



So, on Sunday I slept in (luxury!) and then headed further in to Temple Bar to a tourist office that had been recommended to me by one of my roommates (a New Zealander). It was rather impressive. I don't think I've ever seen a tourist office quite so busy before. I had a wander around their shop and then bought a ticket for the hop-on hop-off sightseeing bus.



One of the bus stops was right outside the tourist office so I hopped on. As it was valid for 24 hours I decided to do the entire circuit and then the following day use the bus to take me to the sites I wanted to see.

The guide on the bus was absolutely hilarious. She was the most vivacious Irish lady I've ever met. She would have been in her early 60s and hails from Belfast originally. She was such a character. We got a lot of information about Dublin but also a lot of information about her life and Irish independence and the period of economic growth Ireland is going through. It was an amazing way to see the city.

The bus roughly took us past all of the main monuments. We went past Christchurch Cathedral, St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin Castle, the Guinness Storehouse, Kilmainham Gaol, the Four Courts, the Ha'penny bridge, and O'Connell Street (which is the main drag). At O'Connell Street we had to get off and change buses. O'Connell Street is the first and last stop on the tour (I'd gotten on at the 8th stop), so to continue onwards we had to change buses. Unfortunately this one had a pre-recorded tour so we lost our wonderful tour guide. The rest of the tour took us past Trinity College, the National Library, Gallery and Museum, St Stephen's Square and then I hopped off at the tourist office where I'd started from.

It was a rather lovely way to see the city and helped in my planning of what I wanted to see and how I was going to do it.

I ended up having really crappy roommates that night. I'm in a 6 bed room, but just 2 people can make it a crappy experience. The two irritating ones were 2 German girls who weren't friendly in any way. One of them had spread her stuff all over the floor so I was barely able to get into my bed. She wasn't at all apologetic, so I just shoved her stuff out of my way whenever I needed to! Made me feel much better!

Luckily they were only in the room for one night. I didn't think I would have been able to handle them for several nights.

I woke up this morning - my first day of proper sightseeing - and felt like crap. *sigh* I'd had a feeling this would probably happen. Because we'd been going flat-stick for the last 2 months, I knew that as soon as I stopped my body would decide it wanted a break for a while and I'd invariably get the flu. Turns out I was right. However, I wasn't going to let that stop me, instead I just decided to alter my plans slightly and not do as much as I'd been planning on.

My hop-on hop-off bus ticket was only going to last me a couple of hours this morning, so I decided to head out to Kilmainham Gaol, which is a bit further out of the city than everything else.

I'm sure by the name you can probably guess what Kilmainham Gaol was. Kilmainham was Dublin's jail for a good 200 years and only closed in the mid-1920s.

You can only visit the jail as part of a guided tour, but as entrance and tour only costs 5 euros, it's not bad. The tour itself was excellent. The guide was very informative and managed to not overload us with information. The jail is pretty depressing, particularly when you hear of the conditions that many of the prisoners lived in due to overcrowding. Something that I found interesting was that 4000 criminals were transported from Kilmainham Gaol in the early to mid-1800s and every single one of them was transported to Australia (I want no comments from you Americans!!)

After the tour I hopped back onto the bus and headed back into the centre of Dublin and got off at the top of O'Connell Street. As the rain was holding off for a while I decided to walk to the river, at the bottom of O'Connell Street. O'Connell Street has been rather well layed out. The street is extremely wide, which huge footpaths (so you're not constantly dodging people) and heaps of trees. There are quite a few statues along the length of O'Connell Street. Starting at the top is the Parnell monument, then the James Joyce statue, then the Spike and finally the O'Connell monument.

The Spike is a very modern monument built in 2003. It was built to replace a monument (the name of which I can't remember) that had been destroyed many years earlier. The Spike is pretty much as it sounds. It's a very tall (120m high) metal spike and at the top it is covered in 11,000 lights. Most of the locals don't particularly like because they don't seem to understand the point of it. I think it's quite impressive and a nice, modern monument for a city that is very rapidly moving into the 21st century.

The O'Connell monument is quite interesting because it is full of bullet holes. The bullet holes come from the 1916 rebellion when a group pushing for independence from Britain took control of the General Post Office and held the city by force for 5 days. During that time much fighting took place between the rebels and the English and it was during this time that much of the city centre of Dublin was destroyed and the statue aquired its bullet holes. The rebellion wasn't a success and the leaders were taken to Kilmainham Gaol and executed by firing squad over a period of 9 days.

Apparently there had been talk over the years of patching up the bullet holes on the O'Connell monument, but it was successfully argued that they too are a part of the history of Dublin.

After O'Connell Street I decided to wander along the Northern side of the river Liffey to the Ha'penny bridge. There is a lovely boardwalk that runs along the northern side of the river and right at the start of it, at O'Connell Street, there was a coffee shop, so I bought myself a hot chocolate and strolled along the river. The Ha'penny Bridge wasn't far from O'Connell Street (nothing is, Dublin is a rather tiny city) so it didn't take me long to reach it. The Ha'penny bridge is only of the earliest bridges in Dublin. Officially it's name is the Liffey Bridge, but nobody calls it that. Instead it is known as the Ha'penny bridge. It is known as such because, for a period of a hundred years, there was a toll of half a penny to cross the bridge. So, it became known as the Ha'penny bridge and the name has stuck.

I'd been planning to head back to my hostel after I'd walked across the Ha'penny Bridge. My hostel is on the South side of the river and between the Ha'penny Bridge and O'Connell Street. However, it was a nice day and the rain was still holding off, so I decided to head to Grafton Street. Grafton Street is the main shopping street in Dublin and certainly the most expensive. The street is pedestrianised and is a popular place to find buskers and today I wasn't disappointed. I passed at least 4 different groups of buskers. It certainly isn't what you're used to in the way of buskers. Most of the music that was being played was classical and very good quality. I even passed 3 boys, who couldn't have been more than 15. One was playing a banjo, the other a guitar and the last one was playing a violin. They were playing traditional Irish folk music and it was lovely. I think you would have loved it Uncle John.

After I'd spent a bit of time wandering along Grafton Street, peering into all of the shop windows and forcing myself not to go inside (except for the bookstores, the call was just too strong to resist), I headed back to the hostel. I think I picked the right time to come back as it wasn't long after that it finally started to rain.

It's been a rather pleasant afternoon and a nice introduction to Dublin. I think I'm going to stay in Ireland until my next dig starts in Faversham, Kent - which is around the 20th. Hopefully I'll be able to get over to Galway or Cork, not entirely sure yet.

Anyway, this was supposed to just be a quick update to let you know that I'm in Dublin.
Typically for me I just couldn't help myself and kept on writing!

Toodles for now.

More over the next few days.

A few photos

Mum requested I post a couple of photos, so here goes.

This is me in digging outfit swinging the pickaxe. Notice the sunhat combined with hardhat for a lovely look. Apparently I look like a natural with the pickaxe.

This is Steve (of the Chicken Fried Rice) who is modelling my hat and I am modelling his.

This is myself and Indira, rather drunk, after having slipped down the steps of the fountain in front of the Pantheon. If you look closely you can see the water on my skirt.

This is the Venice group. We're standing in front of the church used as the exterior for the Venetian library featured in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We planned to find this church while we were in Venice and on our last day (as we were racing to the train station because we were running very late) we finally located it. The funny thing was that we'd had to walk past this church several times a day to get to our hostel and had never realised it was the one we were looking for! As archaeologists, how could we resist having our photo taken in front of the church featured in Indiana Jones!

(from left to right: Steve, Sam, myself, Neal, Andreas, Jess and Indira)

I hope that's enough for now. I have plenty more photos, but I am only able to upload a couple at a time, so I hope they will tide everyone over for a while.

Decision

Ok, so I've reached a decision (and it's only taken me 7 weeks to get here).

I should have acknowledged earlier on how hard it was to get updates posted, I'm just so tired after digging all day I don't have the energy to sit in front of a computer and type for a couple of hours.

So, I'm not going to update until after the dig is over and I'm back in the UK.

The digging finishes on Wednesday and then the final day is Thursday. I'll probably be flying out of Rome on Friday or Saturday (depending on flight times and prices).

I know on my itinerary it says that I am planning to spend a week or so travelling around Italy, however, I've done a bit of travelling while on the digs at the weekends and am ready to be back in an English speaking country for a while.

Therefore, I think I'm going to head back to Edinburgh. You may remember that I missed a couple of days in Edinburgh because I was sick with the flu, which meant that I really didn't get to see as much as I would have liked to of the city.

I think I'll probably have about 5 days in Edinburgh and then travel to Dublin for a few days and then head towards Faversham for my dig with the Kent Archaeological Field School.

I will attempt to use some of my time in Edinburgh to sit down and update the rest of the Vignacce dig info.

Until then...