Tag: dublin

The Blessington street Basin

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Just a day before I had to fly back we visited another nice hidden park, just beside our home. Funny, that I had never been there because it was so close. The Blessington Street Basin had been a water reservoir in the past and after that made into a public park.

It was such an old small place, with a pond with the water birds in the middle and narrow walking path around it. Sean said it’s a place where the parents bring their children to feed ducks and because of that, there was a big board where you could read what the water birds eat and what they don’t eat and what can you find from the park to give them. That’s a good idea and helps you to explain to your children that the birds don’t eat the same things that you fancy and very often it could be very dangerous to feed them with a wrong stuff.

Clontarf Castle

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It seems that I was lucky to get a financing for a contact seminar in Dublin. The seminar is going to take place in November in Clontarf Castle and as I was here for a weekend, we made a little trip there to be sure that I will find it. The venue looks gorgeous – the old and new are mixed well together and I think I will be pretty happy to even stay here for a night. I will wait for the real program and see if there’s an urgent need to stay there or is it possible to come back home and go again in the morning. Both variants will work for me now and somehow I really feel curious to stay there at least for the first night and take as much as I can out of this contact seminar.

file_004The seaside region looked really nice, even from the window of the bus and it’s again such kind of a posh place to live. I love Dublin because of all these differences you can find from different parts of the town. For me, of course, the seaside regions seem the most attractive but it has always been like that with every seaside place I have been. And in any case I caressed the lions, maybe it doesn’t only work at Trafalgar Square  but with any other lions as well. I really want to come back here and I can confirm it with whatever it needs, so caressing the lions is just one of these little cute beliefs that you can just do, when you want to send your wish somewhere out there 🙂

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Perculiar Children

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As we both love Fantasy books and movies and the movie of Miss Peregrine and her Peculiar Children had just come to the cinemas in Dublin and so we went to see it. I was the only one who had read the first 2 books the big and the Little Seans had just seen the trailers but we all liked it. Little Sean was a bit confused about the time travelling storyline because he didn’t expect it by watching the trailers. Big Sean had probably listened to my thoughts about the books and now got excited to read them too.

National Botanic Gardens

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My last summer day in Dublin ended up in the National Botanic Gardens which I had only glanced when we drove past of it in July. The Botanic Gardens are like a big park with nice old greenhouses and totally free to enter, so again, a perfect place for families to spend a lovely day outside and teach their kids something new when enjoying and having fun together.

We are a small family without young kids but always able to enjoy new things together and have a lot of fun every single time. This time, I didn’t forget to bring my selfie-stick, so we tried to use it as much as we could and now I have such a collection of flowers and us among all this beauty.

The National Botanic Gardens of Ireland are old, they were founded in 1750 by the Dublin Society. for example, our first Mud Cure resort of Haapsalu was founded 75 years later (1825) and our Promenade and the park around it even after that. Nowadays it inhabits more than 20 000 living species and I think the best part are all these big old trees with labels and stories besides them so every time you feel that you want to get to know a bit more, you just have to walk to the tree and read about it.

The old glasshouses,  the Palm House and the Curvilinear Range are amazing too, especially because of their architecture, both build in the 19-th century. The whole park is divided into different gardens and it is easy to follow the signs and walk around. I am sure we have to come back in May or June when everything is really blooming because this place is worth to visit more than once.

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A seaside day in Dún Laoghaire

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Dún Laoghaire is a small suburban seaside town, located just 12 km’s from Dublin by train. Actually, it’s a part of Dublin and it takes about 15 minutes to reach it from the city centre but when you are already there, nothing reminds you the big and busy capital city and you feel yourself like in a real summer resort town. Long and nice promenade takes you along the seaside and calm and well-rested people are walking their dogs, riding their bicycles and strolling along the seashore, sitting on the benches and enjoying their 99 Flake ice-creams. Even the weather seemed to be totally different from the city weather and we had to take off our jackets and put on the sunglasses and of course, buy the 99 flakes at once.

I was wondering why do they still call them 99-s when they don’t cost 99p-s or there doesn’t seem to be any other connection with that number and so I had to google it. And the result was amazing – the ice-cream served in a cone with a Flake 99 is UK-s (and probably Irish) favourite ice-cream and I pretty much have to say that it’s my favourite ice-cream too for now. But calling them 99 has a long historical touch – the majority of ice-cream merchants in the 30-s were Italians and in the days of the monarchy, the Italian King had an elite guard consisting of 99 soldiers. After that everything elite or first class was called 99. That’s how they started to call them so. I also found that the Flake has to be 99 mm-s long and the cones had also cost 99 p-s in the past, but somehow I like the story of Italian elite the most. Now I know that my taste is elite 🙂

The name of the place is very hard for me to remember, especially the pronunciation but I am so used that the Irish names are the tough ones and when you learn it, it’s not difficult any more – /dun lieeri/, it sounds for me, and it means The Fort of Laoghaire. The high king of Ireland, Lóegaire mac Néill, chose this place as his sea base from where to carry out raids in the 5-th century. The town Dún Laoghaire dates from the 1820s and was called Kingstown at first. The two piers were founded in the 19-th century and the harbour is now one of the largest in the country. We picked the East Pier for our walk and after googling it came out to be the most popular and even used in some movies. The long walk ends at the old Lighthouse where you can also find  a small cafe and the ice-cream parlour, selling the Flake 99, of course.  The buildings on the pier reminded me a lot of our Haapsalu promenade, probably all the summer resorts have something in common 🙂

On that day Dún Laoghaire was hosting the Laser Radial Youth and Men’s World Championship and we saw thousands of small boats coming back to the harbour. The amount of them was unbelievable and they still kept arriving when we left.

The piers seemed to be also a favourite place for local guys who practised diving from the quay. That was a bit terrifying to watch, especially that the water didn’t seem to be too warm and not too clean either but this little matter didn’t stop the boys.

I have to say it was one of my most beautiful days here and Dublin still surprises me – you can find so many different sides of it and you never get bored. And seaside places are among my favourites anyway.

 

Shakespeare in the park

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I haven’t seen a lot of Shakespeare’s plays and recently I haven’t seen one for a while. So the idea, that they are playing Shakespeare in the open air seemed very attractive and as the weather had been nice and sunny too, we decided to go to see it.

The play was performed in Casino Marino park. Casino Marino was built at the end of the 18-th century as a home of Charlemont Earl James Caulfield. So the name Casino comes from Italian word “casa”, which means home and there has never been a real casino in this house. From all the four sides the Casino is guarded by stone lions and the view to the Wicklow mountains of the background is breathtaking.

Unfortunately, they haven’t paid too much attention to the windows, which are really very small but probably the view from the balcony is picturesque.  The house is an example of neo-classical architecture, it seems very small outside but has 16 rooms inside but we didn’t come here to enjoy the pearls of architecture because we have come to see the Irish Shakespeare and so we move on to the small meadow at the end of the park.

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The .audience is well prepared – some of them had even taken picnic baskets with food and wine with them and everyone, even the small children, were enjoying themselves and “Measure to Measure” by William Shakespeare with a small Irish twist began.

 

The first Irish twist brings all the story to Dublin where the biggest problems are immorality and cheating. So during the play, we must get to know who is the father of the child of the poor pregnant girl who has been sent to do the laundry for the nuns and if he would be hung for that sin at once or would there be some other way to save his soul. Thank god, they don’t hang him and they all live happily ever after 🙂

 

I enjoyed the play in spite of some language problems with Shakespeare’s text, local accent, and jokes I didn’t get so perfectly but it didn’t matter at all. It was a nice evening, a new experience and good actors that made it up for me. Now I really want to go to the real theatre in Dublin.

My first home-made pasta

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When you have got a pasta machine and it has been lonely for a while and almost forgotten that it’s meant for making pasta, it seems to be the right time to take it out and give it a try. Especially if there’s someone around who has never done it.

Pasta making has always seemed to me as a lot of mess, a kitchen full of flower and hours of spending doing a hard work and after that ou will get just pasta. But as we both like cooking and I like especially cooking together, then I was quite interested and really wanted to try to make a real home-made pasta. It came out that it wasn’t such a mess at all and it was a great fun to see how these narrow spaghetti came through the holes of the pasta machine and the result was tasty. Even that we put too much lemon into the avocado sauce couldn’t ruin it and our home-made pasta was grand 🙂

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From Galway Girl to Molly Malone

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In some reason, I have always loved Irish music, long before my feet touched Ireland and long before I even imagined that it could become my second home. I loved the long sad stories of “Molly Malone” and “Danny Boy”, the happy melodies of “Galway Girl”, “Whiskey in the Jar” and “Wild Rover” and the very old “It’s a long way to Tipperary”  and I even didn’t know where Tipperary really was. Somehow these melodies suited me and I wanted to play them in my English lessons when talking about English speaking countries.

Now I have had some nice experiences to be in real Irish pubs with real Irish music and I must say that whenever I hear them playing “Wild Rover”, which seems to be the most played song, and even if I know that it’s the most touristic performance in Temple Bar in the middle of the day, I feel that I want to sit down and stay. But one of my best experiences has been still in a pub in Duncannon, where the musicians just sat around the table and played, sometimes drank beer, and played again, some locals joined them and sang and the whole pub sang with them and they all knew the words. that was amazing.

So on our second Irish Dance evening in Parliament Hotel Pub with our friends from Estonia, I was very happy that besides the dancers there were also musicians singing and playing. And after our trip to Galway, the “Galway Girl” was just the right piece of music to listen to.

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The evening ended at the Bank, which is another remarkable pub in Dubin city centre, located in the real old bank and absolutely worth to visit. The interior is luxurious and a bit royal in spite that it is a real pub where you don’t have to order anything else than a pint of beer or cider. So with 2 days we managed to visit three different pubs, definitely much more than usually with three weeks 😀

 

Irish Dancing

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Everyone who comes to Ireland wants to see Irish Dancing, which probably became really famous after Riverdance performed on Eurovision in 1994. That’s why my friends who visited us in July asked us for taking them to see Irish Dance. So we carried out a big online search to see which different places are offering Irish Dance evenings and which of them are not so awfully touristic and expensive. As the Church is in our neighbourhood and despite being a real touristic place is still worth to see, we suggested them two options – the Church and the Parliament Hotel and they picked both of them 🙂

So on a nice warm summer evening, when our friends had just come from a Viking Splash Tour, which they loved a lot, and we had just arrived from our Cork visit, we ended up at the Church and enjoyed some good Irish dancing with a nice dinner, just like any other tourists, and as the other tourists, I also made a video and uploaded it on my Facebook page, where the Curch had also liked it.

Dublin City Gallery – the Hugh Lane Gallery

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One part of the Dublin City Gallery is located so near to us that it has taken us three years to visit it. This part is called the High Lane Gallery and when you look the building from outside you can never imagine how big it really is. So I was prepared to go to a small art exhibition, but already in the first room, I faced so famous artists as Monet, Renoir, and Rodan.

We had visited the Dublin National Gallery before, but this one was probably too near to us and as it happens, that these places which are so near, that you can go there any time you want, just come out to be the last ones you really visit. Just because you can go there any time 🙂 It was a nice collection to see, not only because of these famous names but also all the Irish artists that were exposed were good. And I think that we spent a good two hours there walking around and enjoying the paintings. There were also lots of little rooms where they showed the movies, but the building was a bit cold and it wasn’t so comfortable to sit and watch like that.