Dublin Trip

A touch late for my report on last weekends Dublin trip but here goes anyway, we set off Friday afternoon and eventually arrived in Dublin at around 7pm. It was only a one hour flight but Ryanair have really selected their stewardesses well, reckon it would help if the one doing the safety announcements could speak understandable English (thats cheap European labour for you).
It was a short taxi ride to our hotels and as we were driving along I remember thinking how the streets just looked like English streets. I say hotels because most of the group wre in a different one to me & Lofty's brother cos we had booked late. No complaints though cos our hotel was excellent & just around the corner from O'Connell Street (the main street).
It was a case of dumping our luggage in the rooms & straight out to the Pubs (it was a birthday bash). Eventually we moved on to a restaurant for a meal, think I had steak on Friday night, can't remember. It was then on to a few more Bars which were all traditional Irish types. One thing we did notice was the cost of things compared to bach home, it is a very expensive City & that coupled with the poor £ to Euro exchange rate everything cost a small fortune. Important stuff like beer was the equivelant of between £4 & £5 per pint.
As the night wore on a people decided to make their way back to their hotels of course not to be beaten I stayed out till the last, think eventually getting to my room at around 2am.
We got up and was just having breakfast when a phone call from Loftys wife told us to get a move on as they had booked us on the Open topped bus City tour. We had to leave having 2nds & made our way round.
Now we got on the bus and a couple of the crowd said they was going to sit dowstairs in the covered section, of course us been heroes decided to sit upstairs in the Open. Now the tour took around 1.5 hours and believe me it was freezing, but not been one for surrendering we stook it out. It was actually quite interesting cos I didn't previously know too much about Irish history.
After we had warmed up following the tour we found a nice Pub for the afternoon in the Temple Bar area to watch the Rugby that some wanted to see (England v South Africa) while the women went shopping. That was a waste of time cos England got thumped so we decided to stay for the Footie results, in fact by the time we made our way back to the hotel to get ready for the night out we had sampled plenty of the local brew.
We all met up in the evening and went to a well known Irish Restaurant (Quays) we had booked for our main meal. We all had a good laugh & following the meal it was onto a few Pubs. Remember one and think they had the worst musician I've ever seen, just tried to play everything too fast.
Not a lot of incidents to report, think Ireland is just about Pub crawls, the only thing I'd say are the locals seem friendly in fact one bloke seemed to want to hug me & everyone else he saw. Got back to my room sometime in the early hours and slept in a bit Sunday morning eventually making breakfast at about 10.30am.
Then had a casual walk around before finding a coffee shop at lunch time, made our way back to the hotels mid-afternoon to get our taxi to the airport.

Did take some photos mainly of the City Bus tour -

Dublin Photos