Dawson Street, Dublin, Sights

One street I have spent quite some time on while in Dublin, is Dawson Street.

View of Dawson Street

Irish National Library and Natural History Museum

Dublin has a very rich literary history. Yeats, James Joyce, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde all hail from Dublin. You can see the homes of some of these authors, albeit from the outside. Oscar Wilde's old home is now the American College in Dublin. 

One of the stops on the Dublin Hop on Hop off Bus tour, is the National Library. The building itself is so interesting to look at! I couldn't help playing with a toy camera effect on our little Canon.

View from the library across the car park.

Dublin Day 1 - Trinity College

We landed in Dublin on Sunday, which meant I was out sight seeing first thing I could Monday. It just doesn't seem right that Brad had to go to work! I won't gush, but suffice to say, I think I have the best husband in the world :-)

I bought a hop on hop off two day dublin bus tour. I snapped pics as I went. 

One of the first places it stopped was at Trinity College. 

The college was founded in 1592 by letters of patent from Queen Elizabeth the first. Obviously she was protestant and wikipedia says that it was seen as the university of the protestant ascendancy. It was also establish to consolidate the rule of the Tudor monarchy. For example, only from 1873 could Catholics or dissenters become professors or fellows or receive scholarships. Then again, the Catholic Church in Ireland forbade its members to attend the university without permission from the Bishop, until, get this...1970! Pretty crazy!

Main Square

Ireland via Frankfurt!

Some of our avid followers have been clamouring for more posts :-) Apologies for the long delay in posting pics from our current trip to Europe! It's just been such a joy of sight seeing and touring that I haven't made time to get to blogging. Let me remedy that now and start with our flight over. 

KLM basically closed their boarding gate too early in Hong Kong so even if our flight from Manila hadn't been delayed, we still would not have made the connection! Needless to say I've been on to KLM about it and hopefully some corrections to their published available connections will be forthcoming!

In any event, Cathay Pacific was really great and bumped us onto one of their flights via Frankfurt. This was perfect because it gave us a chance to get to see our very good friends from Germany! Thank goodness we'd made the effort to get Schengen visa's. It made it possible to just change plans like that! 

Our friends took us to a beautiful place about an hours drive from Frankfurt called Loreley. There is a legend about the sirens singing on the great rock and as a result causing many ship wrecks. Or something like that at least. We went to the top of the cliff/hill/mountain and had coffee at the top. The view of the Rhine was exceptional!

Barge on the Rhine