We woke to another pleasant day, our last here in Dublin before heading off for our bike-riding adventures. We headed out mid-morning for what turned out to be a nice leisurely day, deciding what we wanted to do on the spur of the moment, and enjoying every minute!
A definite highlight of our stay here has been the variety of interesting architecture. The photos above and below are but two examples of the styles we’ve encountered. I know no details about the building above, we just loved the combo of the orange brick and the turquoise dome. The one below is Dublin Castle. The oldest part (which isn’t visible) dates from the early 13th century, and the tower in the photo was built in 1411!
The activities for the day were a little more shopping, a visit to the National Gallery, a walk through two different parks, not to mention a lot more walking in general! In the morning we explored the shopping on Francis St., but it turned out to be almost exclusively antiques. Undeterred, we headed back to the main south-side shopping area, looking for a fish & chips shop. Low and behold, we ended up coming up the street where the “oldest chipper in Dublin” was located, which I’d noticed the day we arrived! Since it’s a “takeaway”-only shop (like most fish & chips places), we took our brown bag and wandered down to the Trinity College green where we could enjoy our lunch on a nice bench and share some chips with the pigeons. It was dee-lish!
Below is a photo of Mallory next to one of two huge beautiful Oregon Maples on the Trinity College Campus…
After lunch we decided to visit the National Gallery of Ireland, where the highlights were a show of new acquisitions. The pieces were from a wide variety of periods and schools of art, but my favorite was a small Van Gogh from when he first moved to Paris, before his style became so intensely impressionistic.
In the late afternoon we opted for walks through two of Dublin’s beautifully and densely landscaped parks. The first, St. Steven’s, was bigger, so we didn’t explore it very much. Archbishop Ryan Park, in Merrion Square, was smaller, with lots of interesting little areas. It also had some spectacular evergreen plantings, an example of which is below:
After working up an appetite for dinner, we thought we’d stick with the seafood theme for the day and go for that other traditional Irish pescatarian delicacy… sushi! We found a friendly little sushi bar right on the river, and had one more very sweet dinner together in Dublin.
Here’s one last photo from today. Another rare picture of your intrepid blogger/photographer, this time perched on a cool bronze throne sculpture in Merrion Square (but still looking like a gnome)…
