I have been around but every time I go to update my blog I run out of time. In the meantime just to let you know I have been to Ireland, done a lot of Scotland, am currently in Glasgow and will be picking up a car this afternoon to drive around Britain for a few weeks. First stop is going to be Sterling - I think I will stay there tonight but haven't booked any accommodation yet. As you can tell I plan a lot in advance.....

Have lots to update - and promise to do it - and have kept a bit of a diary along the way to remember. Won't be done today but it will happen in the near future. Hope everyone is doing well.

Toni
xxoo

Well here I am on the road again and am currently in Dublin. To start with I had to leave Janelle's place around 5.45am in order to get to the airport in time for my 9.30am flight - I was flying out of Stansted which is the most inconvenient airport out of all that service London. Once there it went as smoothly as it can with Ryan Air and me with a backpack but once on the flight I copped a screaming kid and an ignorant parent who wasn't interested in trying to calm the kid down so that was a fun hour or so flight.

While at Stansted I had bought a ticket to catch an airport express shuttle bus service so all was good getting into Dublin from that perspective. I navigated to the hostel and its here I am thinking all told things have been going too smoothly and I was right. The hostel is an absolute disaster zone - it's very much a hit and miss proposition if any of the toilets are working or if the floorboards don't warp and come up out of the floor or looking down into the floor below where the skirting boards used to be - needless to say I my initial thoughts were this place is not going to be good.

Without having seen the room because I was too early for check in I dumped my bag and took off to explore Dublin. I firstly saw Trinity College which is about 1000 or so years old - of course most of the buildings aren't. It was Freshers week i.e. new starters so there was a lot of people in the common and it was nice just to wander around. checked out an area on campus called Botany Bay for Dad since he was born there (in Oz of course) but all it was was a couple of tennis courts and a awful smell since the tennis courts had garbages around them. It is apparently known as that because the rowdy students used to hang out there however long ago and it was thought they were likely candidates to be convicts in the future and sent to Botany Bay.

I debated around the idea of checking out the Book of Kells which is located in a building in Trinity but decided against it since I had seen some of them in Canberra about 6-8 years ago.

From there I wandered up to Dublin castle and accidentally found the Chester Beatty Library. This guy collected ancient texts - in particular holy texts and he had them from just about every religion imaginable. I enjoyed just wandering through there and reading up a bit around the religions the texts represented.

I should just say here Dublin city centre is small so walking from one place to another doesn't take a very long time at all....so after the library I did find the entrance to Dublin castle and found that it was only guided tours and since the outside didn't impress me much I gave the inside guided tour a miss altogether and wandered down the road to get to the area known as Temple Bar - the supposedly bohemian area of Dublin. Nice to wander around but its very touristy so I can't say it did a great deal for me but it was nice to go for a walk around.

After Temple Bar I walked over the river back to the hostel and picked up my bag to take to my room and found that I was sharing with 5 French guys. Most girls would be excited about this but they looked liked the French equivalent of the Aussie yobo and it turned out they were exactly like that as later that night at 4am they came back to the hostel drunk and smelly and loud. After repeatedly asking them to keep quiet I gave up and got the night manager who told them to be quiet and around 20 minutes later they finally were.

Anyway after dumping my bag in the room I headed down O'Connell St which is right next to where I was staying. It is essentially a shopping street and so I just went up and down and found that it had alot of the same stores as what I would see in London so it was nothing special. The best thing I saw was a t-shirt in a store saying 'Rehab is the new black'. Only that it cost 44 euros stopped me from buying it. I thought it was a real grin....

After my interrupted sleep from the French yobos I asked management on the Saturday if I could move rooms and they let me do it so was happy with that outcome. So after brekkie I set out to see the National Museum - although small it was a great museum and had some really interesting stuff. Because Ireland has so many bogs the amount of stuff people in the past have put in the bogs is huge so they keep finding more and more and its all still in really good condition because the bogs naturally preserve things. The weirdest stuff is probably bodies which you could view - they honestly look like surreal human sculptures. This along with a lot of bronze and gold made it a good museum to have a look at.

From here I debated going to the Natural History Museum (called the 'dead zoo' in Lonely Planet because it is full of stuffed animals) or the National Gallery. I ultimately decided on the National Gallery because the idea of seeing a bunch of dead and dusty stuffed animals really didn't do it for me. The gallery was OK but as with everything in Europe is stuffed to the gills with Renaissance art. Frankly who wants to view a portrait by an unknown artist (at least to me) titled 'Spanish noblewoman circa 1750'? I have now learnt to walk past those v.v.v. quickly. There was quite a bit of Irish art in there so that was what I mostly focused on.

I was quickly becoming hungry and I also knew I had to find a pub so I could watch Australia play England in the rugby so I went hunting and found a pub then pulled up a seat at the bar and ordered a meal and a beer. Needless to say I was not impressed with the outcome and was also surrounded by a large amount of English to make matters worse. To help me drown my sorrows I decided to go to the Jameson's whisky distillery and go on their tour. Although the tour doesn't take you through the distillery itself but instead is the contrived version of what it used to be it was still pretty good and to top it off you got a free drink of whisky at the end.

I had had enough by this stage so headed back to the hostel to check out my new room (the new one minus the French yobos). Its here I met a couple from Brissy, Lisa and Aaron and after chatting awhile they asked if I wanted to come out for a drink and dinner with them. We decided to go to a bar that was showing the NZ vs France game (yet another travesty but this time surrounded by French supporters). I was going for NZ of course - after all it would be like not supporting your little brother. This sense of pervading loss was getting me down so headed back to the hostel to have an early night.

That brings me to today (Sunday 7 October) and after minimally interrupted sleep (i.e. no French yobos) I took myself to an internet cafe and rang home to check in on the family so they knew I was not lost in a ditch somewhere. From here I found the place where my tour starts tomorrow and clarified a few things with them then took myself off to yet another internet cafe so I could book my flight, accommodation and tour I am taking from Edinburgh after this Ireland tour finishes. That done I took myself to lunch then off to St Patricks church. As churches go it obviously doesn't beat what I have already seen in Italy but it was still nice and it was something that you should probably do in Dublin. After this I just wandered around a few of the parks and sat in the grass and read my book for awhile then eventually landed here where I thought that I probably won't get much of a chance to update my blog while on tour.

My overall opinion of Dublin is that its small and not all that pretty and I have heard more foreigners walking around than locals so that was a bit of a surprise. There is a fair amount to do if you can be bothered but I just decided to hit a few of the ones I wanted to go to then left it at that.

Hope all is well with everyone.

Cheers
Toni
xxoo

Watching BBC morning show this morning and they described the weather as being dull and drab. Never heard of the weather being called drab before - made me think that obviously overcast, drizzly and grey is drab so came to the conclusion that grey is not the new black over here in the UK because it's 'drab'.