You walk past it three times only to find it's temporarily closed

Hey ho, I'm finally home. Oh boy what a week.

So! I was in Dublin. As I said. And here's what happened! (This is gonna be really image heavy btw)

Day 1
We got up at 7:30. Outrageous, I know it was the earliest I've gotten up in like a year probably. The trip to the airport and at the airport were pretty painless (altho we were really confused for a moment when the info board told us to go to "border control" which sounded suuuper confusing but just meant passport check lol) and the flight was fine aside from the wi-fi not working so I had no spotify :(

Here's a pic I took outside the airport ✨

We got ourselves bus passes and then took a bus to the place we're staying which is like a bunch of rooms like the one we were staying at in Amsterdam. Our room is super funny tho, it's out back and has a glass door! Like, it was a balcony door, but on ground level.
Also there were cats!!

After chilling for a bit we took a bus back into the city center and basically spent the rest of the day walking and looking around. We found some establishments with funny names

and a market hall (?)

Then we walked around aimlessly for a while only to realize that we were going in the wrong direction and had to turn around and blah. We were looking for Hodges Figgis, which is a huge bookstore (it has 4 stories) bc we wanted to buy books. We did. It had a cool wall with some Irish writers so here's a pic of that:

Then we ate at a local McDonald's and then we walked around a bit more in search of a makeup store because Oona forgot her makeup brush only to be instructed to go to the pharmacy which was literally next to the McDonald's. She bought the brush and I bought shampoo (I thought there'd be some here so I didn't pack any) because these are things that are sold in a pharmacy apparently.

Then we bought some cake and came back.

We managed to spend a total of 200e today, tho 80 of that was for the bus passes. Also my Visa won't work properly??? Idk it worked at the McDonald's but nowhere else?? We do have some cash but it's still really inconvenient ://

There's a bookshelf at the hotel (it's not really a hotel? imma call it a hotel) that has a bunch of books in it that we assume are free game to read while we're here. So we picked one up, to read in the evenings. It's called "The Song of Achilles" and it's a book I actually own but haven't had time to read, so if we don't have time to finish it here we can finish it at home. So far it's okay, there's a bunch of Greek names I can't pronounce tho lol

Day 2
Since we went to bed so early yesterday, we got up around 8 this morning. Granted, that's 10 in Finland so it's not that early I guess but anyway. Today we had a museum day. A day of museums. Also we saw the cat again.

We started by taking a bus to the center again, this time something other than the trusty 9 we'd ridden all day yesterday. But yeah. The first museum was the National Gallery. It was a nice place, an art museum with European art from 1600-1900 I think. There was also a changing exhibition we didn't go see bc it cost money. Plus one section of it was closed for maintenance :( Well, here's some highlights;

Before we left there I called the bank about my card not working (after calling mom ofc). They weren't exactly sure what was wrong with it but they thought it might be a technical problem or something and idk. I did manage to pay our lunch with it so I guess they fixed it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Speaking of lunch, I ate a pie!

It was good, tho I did burn my tongue a bit...

After that we walked around for a bit, checked out the National Natural History museum (ie, animals)

Sadly the upstairs was closed for maintenance... Then we found Merrion Square and a statue of Ya Boi (ie Oscar Wilde)

And then we walked around St.Stephen's Green for a bit

and visited the Little Museum of Dublin. It was a super cool place and also the only museum we paid for today. Highly recommend it.

Unfortunate backlight in the train, but oh well.

In the evening we visited the Dublin castle, saw a tiny rebel

and tried to get to the Chester Beatty Library but it was closed. We went off to find some comic/manga stores, which we did find. Apparently we'd walked right by a bunch yesterday and hadn't noticed. After that we went to the North side of the river for the first time in search of a pub that the Little Museum tour guide recommended (she was super funny btw) called Piper's Corner bc they play traditional music there. On our way we ate some dinner (at a Papa John's lol) but when we found the pub we found out that we'd have to wait like 1.5h before they started playing that music and we were like nah and came back home via grocery store. Got some fruit for breakfast 👌

Day 3
Today we had a bit of a shorter day. We got up and took a bus to IMMA (Irish Museum or Modern Art). We actually got there 10 minutes before they opened so we had to chill for a bit before getting in. It was cool, even tho I'm not big on modern art.

We then took a tram to Irelan
d's National Museum. We didn't actually go in yet at that point, but to lunch. We ate at this little cafe/restaurant called Wuff and I ate a "full Irish".

That one. It's like a breakfast thing. Tried some black pudding. It was... okay I guess. Kinda meh. Then we went to the museum.

It was a pretty cool building. It was a square with a big courtyard in the middle, so it was just four long corridors going around and around. There were some cool things there, like this

and this

and a whole lot of other stuff. There was also an exhibit on Asian art but that was temporarily closed. Are you sensing a theme? I'm starting to sense a theme.

Today we did get into the Chester Beatty Library, but turns out it wasn't a library at all! It was a museum! There were some real old scripture tho so that was cool at least. No pics from there bc photography wasn't allowed. We didn't stay there too long.

After leaving the non-library we stopped by a French café, run by actual French people, and then went off to find the Forbidden Planet (a big comic book/manga store). Turns out we'd literally walked past that yesterday as well. Or like, crossed the bridge to the other side right before it. Oh yeah, here's a picture or the Ha'penny Bridge!

Well, I bought a few mangas from the Forbidden Planet, so at least it wasn't a complete bust like the other comic stores have been.

We considered going to the George (a v famous gay bar) but then didn't really feel like it, so we just took a bus back to Rathmines (the place we stay) to go buy food. We missed our bus stop tho, because it has a different name in the app we use to navigate than what it actually has. So that was great... anyway, we got some subway and drinks and stuff and went back to the hotel. We saw our little cat friend this time! So far we've only seen it in the mornings.

Day 4
Final day. Well, final full day. We started the same as always, ate some breakfast, pet the cat outside our door, took the bus to the city. Today we started by going to St. Patrick's Cathedral. We'd driven past it several times by now, but we thought it'd be nice to at least look inside. There was a queue inside tho, which we didn't get why at first but then we realized there was an entrance fee. To a church!! I mean, what kind of church has an entrance fee? It was 7 euros no less! Like, I'd've payed maybe 2€ as like a voluntary offering but I'm not paying 7€ just to get into a church! So yeah, we were like fuck that, and didn't go in. Instead we went to the park next to it and took a few pics outside.

And then! Something dramatic happened. There was a dog.

There had been plenty of dogs before that of course, but this dog didn't have his human. He was just running around in the park and we were confused for a moment, but he did have a collar so he wasn't a street dog. He was an escapee! We followed the dog for a while, trying to get it to come to us, but it was probably super scared and clearly didn't know where it was going so we couldn't catch it. In the end it got too far from us and we had to stop. Oona did manage to get a few pics of it and put them on a lost dogs website, so hopefully someone finds him and takes him home.

Then we weren't sure what to do. We'd wandered after the dog away from the church but we didn't really want to go back there anyway, so we weren't really sure what to do next. Eventually we decided that we'd go over to Parnell Square, because Dublin's Writers Museum was there. As we got there, we found out that there was going to be a... lecture? about Oscar Wilde's life in an hour and we were like heck yeah and bought tickets to that. This was the second place of the two we'd paid to get in.

We did have an hour before that started tho, so we went to the neighbouring Dublin City Gallery's (aka the Hugh Lane Gallery) cafe for lunch. I had a blaa. That's what it was called. A blaa. It's a type of breadroll, it was basically a hamburger but with a fancy bun. It was super good tho. We still had a bit of time after eating, so we perused the Gallery quickly. There was some cool art, and also the studio of Francis Bacon. Like, after his death his studio (the literal room he painted in) was donated to the Gallery and they like... moved it there. The whole room. It was pretty dope, but I didn't take any pics of it, unfortunately.

We went back to the Writers Museum at one o'clock. The lecturer was a bit late, but that was fine bc then we had some time to see what else was in the museum. She was a very good speaker by the way, I don't know if it's just something inherent to Irish people, but everyone was super nice and really attentive. She asked a lot of questions from the audience about how much they knew of Wilde beforehand and then when there were some more unusual words she made sure if we knew what they meant. That was nice. It was also very informative. I had read about Wilde's life some before, but she went into a lot more detail than I knew so it was fun.

Then we bought some donuts. We bought 7 donuts. Yes, just for the two of us. They were only 15€ tho, like that's like 2€ per donut! And they are big donuts.

Look at them! Yum. We still have five left as I'm writing this in the evening, I'm a bit worried about how we're going to manage to eat all these lol!

Well, after acquiring donuts, we walked around the city for a bit again. We found a mall and tried to find some souvenirs for people. We did find some. I also bought new shoes, because I've been meaning to do that for a while now. Then we went off in search of a place to eat dinner.

We ended up in a place called The Merchant's Arch. We'd walked past it twice by now, since it was right next to the Ha'penny Bridge. It was a pretty nice place, somewhat more of a pub than a restaurant, but they did have food. I ate an Irish stew which wasn't a stew at all, it was a soup. Like, legitimately. It was a meat soup. It was good tho, so eh.

There was also live music there. I had been a nit bummed about not going to the Piper's Corner, so that was a nice surprise. The musician's name was Sean Coffey and he had a really good voice. We sat there for a bit and then we decided to go back home early. We have to get up for our flight pretty early as well, and that was a nice ending to our trip, so we just called it a night.

We got back to the hotel, packed our stuff and went to bed.

Day 5

Fucking hell. Sorcerer was right, everything bad always happens on Fridays.

We got up as we did, finished packing our stuff and left. We had some leftover juice boxes and a small bottle of 7up which we left there that hopefully someone will get some use of. We still had three donuts left, which I packed into my bag.

We still hadn't mailed the postcards we'd bought on Tuesday (and written on Wednesday evening oops). We got on a bus and on the next stop Oona goes "MAILBOX!" and jumps out. So we get off the bus way earlier than we were meant to. That's fine tho, because the walk isn't that long to where the airlink express (airport bus) leaves and now we have a mailbox.

It was a fun mailbox. We continue walking and everything is fine, it's a nice weather and stuff, and we get to the bus stop with 7min to spare. We take the airlink and get to the airport, security check is fine (altho they did take my bag aside for a second? I don't know why though they didn't say and I didn't even see them search the bag) and we do some last minute shopping (candy and whiskey lol) and head over to a Burger King to eat lunch. They had a really weird system there btw, instead of giving people like a buzzer or w/e, people just hung around by the counter until their food was ready. Idk, I thought it was weird and a bit dumb.

But yeah, while we're eating Oona gets a message that our flight is delayed. By almost an hour. Which is just great, because we were there already super early. And then we wait around the plane is more and more delayed and then we move to the gate and it was cold there and we're still waiting and ughhhhhhhhh. We did eventually get into the plane two hours later than we were meant to but then we just... didn't take off for another 15mins? The plane just drove around the airport for a while, idk man. Once we finally took off it was pretty fine, I don't think we still had wi-fi, but I'd downloaded a few episodes of the Adventure Zone beforehand so I just listened to those and soon we were landing. Then we had to walk all the way through Helsinki-Vantaa and finally we got on the I Train and after stopping at a grocery store real quick we were finally home at 9PM.

And like, I dunno, I was super tired at that point, I just took a shower and unpacked and went to bed. I did try to finish this thing then, but as I said I was super tired and Blogger doesn't have a mobile version for some reason??? and adding pictures was a nightmare so I just stopped. Decided I'd do it today (it's Saturday now, hello!) on a computer. And I did! And it's done. And now I'm going to go because I still have a lot of things to do so bye.

Pie out.