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After getting back from Spain I settled down to get a bit of momentum going with some work on TOWER's Workflow version II software. This was moving along gradually until I got a call from Sieman's Nixdorf in Ireland, looking for help getting a presentation together for one of their prospective customers. This seemed to at least provide an opportunity to tack on a weekend and have a peek at Ireland.
Dublin
We got into Dublin on Saturday afternoon and did a bit of a wander around. The main shopping street was completely packed - probably the busiest city street I had encountered. It was my first real rain as well. We managed to brave the weather and snatched a look at the Book of Kells - an ancient religious book that the Irish are pretty proud of. It was done before the printing press and must have taken a million years to write - every page has an incredibly intricate illustration. Dublin was too crowded on a Saturday night to find a restaurant on spec (at least to us raw tourists), so we settled for a burger. On Sunday we organised a bus trip into the hills behind Dublin (County Wicklow). These were incredibly pretty and reminded me a little of the country around Cradle Mountain in Tasmania. It wasn't quite as high, but certainly just as cold. We stopped by a number of "alpine" lakes and had a sandwich and a guinness for lunch. In the afternoon we went on to an old religious site called Glendalough where I chewed up heaps of film.
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Lake in Wicklow |
Stone arch at Glendalough |
Anyway, this was all preparing ourselves for the highlight - the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl. At about 7.30 we met with a group of about 30 others and visited some of the more famous pubs in downtown Dublin. Our guides were local actors, and they acted out various pieces of work that had their origins in the area. The likes of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and others. It felt kind of cool sitting and having a guinness at the bar where James Joyce wrote Ulysses. The rest of the time in Dublin was spent on boring old work stuff, so I won't bother about it. Except to say that Dave Rossi took Maureen and I out to his club for dinner on Tuesday night. This was a great night out (the club required collar and tie and have done so since 1887 or something). I don't think the Irish mists were a great preparation for Wednesday's demo. Anyway, I found Dublin to be a pretty lively town, although perhaps a little wet. I certainly managed a fair quantity of Guinness and Jameison, and it returned me temporarily to smoker status.
Since completing this trip, we had occasion to return to Ireland for another quick visit (I'll get some photos later, I hope). Once again, a quick chance to catch up with the various flavours of rain in Dublin, before picking up a hire car and heading west. Not having any set plan, we ambled through Limerick and eventually decided that Killarney looked a pretty nice place. And, to be sure, to be sure, it certainly is.
The town is really colourful with every shop in the main street neatly painted in bright primary colours, and contains a rich supply of just about every souvenir imaginable. The Irish seem to have the widest array of local mementos imaginable, mainly aided by the Guinness brewery company. The range is so diverse that you even find something that is worthwhile buying. we found it a good place to start stocking up on presents to take home to our culturally deprived friends in Australia.
We managed to get cornered by one of the locals during a stop at the pub (we were just getting shelter from the rain), and marvelled at the irrepressible Irish conversational skills. A few pints of Guinness and some spontaneous Irish folk music meant that it was getting pretty late before we got away. I had to take full responsibility for Australia stealing Jim Stynes from Gaelic football.
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The next day was spent wandering in Killarney National Park, which has the magnificent gardens of Muckross House. In fact the whole countryside was one magnificent garden, and the purple rhodendron was in wild bloom everywhere. We promised to ourselves that we had to come back and do some walking in the Ring of Kerry - it is certainly a magical spot.
Unfortunately, we were on a tight schedule and had to had back east, staying the night in Kilkenny. Anything would pale after the countryside we had just been through, but we managed to spend a pleasant evening wandering in the park around Kilkenny Castle. Got back to Dublin the next day to find that it had started raining again. I guess it wouldn't be so green without it.