Color Me Green

This week's blog topic will be All About Ireland. Claire & I just got back from a 3-day weekend in Ireland and have some good pictures to share from the trip. Great weekend, but after all the flying, busing, metro-ing, and hiking about, tonight I kind of feel like I need one of those "vacations after a vacation", if you know what I mean.

Overall, the trip was great. However, it got off to a somewhat ominous start as our flight via Ryan Air (which I purchased for like $40) was delayed some 3 and a half hours. The airline is one of these budget airlines which somehow manage to make money despite selling tickets for 1 euro on a regular basis (I was recently told that they make a profit by selling "last-minute" spots for much higher sums of money to people who are desparate to get somewhere without having planned ahead). In any case, although the flight itself between Paris and Dublin was only about an hour and a half, we spent probably a total of about 8 hours in transit. So most of our experiences in Dublin itself were in the dark. Here's a pretty shot of some of the downtown bridges, lit up in green (of course), over the River Liffey.

The population of the greater Dublin area is about 1.6 million, which is about a third of the entire population of the Republic of Ireland (about 4.2 million according to wikipedia). So to give you a sense of scale, there are more than twice as many people living in the Paris metropolitan area (just under 10 million) than the entire island of Ireland!

So Friday night we took our own self-guided tour of Dublin-by-night (lots of cool castles, churches, and Viking ruins), had the only decent hamburger I've eaten since July, strolled around the grounds of Trinity College, and just generally people-watched, which can be quite entertaining in a city like Dublin which is dominated by drunken pub life in the late night hours. Here's a shot of some locals lining up at a Fish N' Chip joint which is, of course, painted green.

More to follow!