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On Saturday Aine went to a birthday party – which left me and the big girls alone to do the St Patrick’s Day treasure hunt. It was great! Our team was called the Super Searchers.

Teams of up to 4 people were invited to follow the hunt throughout the city. We had to visit 9 places, answer questions from each place and get a stamp. Spot prizes were given out – the team with the best time (not us) won a weekend in a hotel in Dublin.

It rained the whole day, we had several wardrobe malfunctions, we stopped for lunch in the middle of the “race” but we had a great time. We spent over 5 hours on the hunt.

Here’s the blow by blow: Continue reading →

On Friday night we saw the coolest street show ever. Here’s the description from the St Patrick’s festival web site:

St. Patrick’s Festival and Dublin Docklands presents the Irish premiere of Pearl by the world renowned street theatre company Plasticiens Volants (France). This is an outdoor spectacle for a family audience. Giant inflated puppets will take over the dramatic surroundings of Georges Dock to tell this enchanting story of the precarious journey of a precious pearl. Audiences will be immersed in an extraordinary underwater world of flying fish, ‘joker’ squids, bewitched jellyfish and a scary sea snake. An extraordinary aerial aquarium on a city scale which is not to be missed.

I took a lot of video but I figured I’d just post a couple and give the link for the rest – for the interested minority.

The girls finished school at noon on Friday and don’t go back for two weeks. Aine’s Montessori class did a play for the last. Below is a video clip of the performance.

On Tuesday night we went to a book launch for Terrence Brown. It was ablaze with the Irirsh literati. We saw Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, one of my favorite poet’s to see read Brendan Kennelly, a poet I saw read the next day Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, professor we had at UCD Declan Kiberd, and many others.

The biggest treat was seeing a friend we made last summer Derek Hand. Derek presented at Patrick’s summer school last year. We always enjoy Derek and he’s the one who sent the heads up on the book launch.

The unfortunate this was that there was free wine but no food at the event and we headed to the pub, not for a meal after the event. We had a fun time – but paid for it the next day.

The event was held at the Royal Irish Academy is a fancy place and it was fun to go into one of the fancy buildings with a purpose. We took some pictures. We tried to catch Seamus Heaney, but I’m not sure that we succeeded.

To keep in theme of our very touristy weekend, we went on the Viking Splash Tour on Sunday. The tour uses an amphibian truck to drive through the city and then take a dip into the Grand Canal.

It’s goofy but it’s fun. The driver/tour guide gets the whole bus to growl like Vikings at unsuspecting people throughout the city. The tour guide was excellent – he crams a ton of information into a little space by talking really fast. Also my talking really fast he can fit in jokes that really aren’t appropriate for a PG crowd.

I took a few pictures, which turned out to be useless but I did shoot some video, which is kind of fun if you have the time.

Again here’s a laundry list of the things I learned or saw:

• We boated past the studio where U2 recorded all but one of their albums.
• We boated by apartments where Colin Farrell owns all top five penthouses.
• A penthouse room in the Clarence Hotel (owned by Bono and the Edge) costs €2100 – that’s over $3000 a night!
• We drove by the place where they made a Spice Girl video.
• We drove by markers for the original Dublin City Walls (castle walls) in the Liberties. I know that’s not that interesting for a blog but it helped to figure out what a small city – but larger castle Dublin was.
• I learned many color phrases for the Spire on O’Connell Street (one of the video below goes through them).
• The Whitehouse in DC was designed after Leinster House (where the Dail/govenement meet).
• The smallest cemetery in Dublin is just a few doors down form the Shelburne, one of the fanciest hotels in Dublin.

There’s a ton more but that’s all I can remember today. (You’ll have to click below to see the videos.) Continue reading →

Saturday we all went to out to eat for Patrick’s mom’s birthday. (Her actual birthday is February 29!) We met up with Fearghal at the Mermaid in town. It’s a very nice restaurant. We went for lunch so we didn’t bug people too much with the kids. Kate has found a new love of crème brulee. (It was ginger and rhubarb – mmm!)

After lunch we went up to the Dublin Castle. We started at the Gardens. They are public gardens in the middle of the city but they are obscured by the castle – so they are very quiet. The girls enjoyed running around the labyrinth-like patterns in the lawn. (See the video below.)

Next we stopped in at the Chester Beatty Library. He collected materials on religions from all over the world. So we saw very early renditions of the Bible and the Koran. We also learned a little bit about Buddhism, Islam, and Confucianism. Also we visited the rooftop garden – again the girls really enjoyed running around for a while.

Then we toured the Castle, which is more like a palace. We took a few pictures below. Rather than go blow by blow I thought I better just list out what I remembered:

• The initial Dublin Castle burned down in 1673. There is one tower (the Records Tower) that remains.
• The Castle used to house the Crown Jewels buy they were stolen in 1907.
• Hibernia is a Roman word that means winter or never-ending winter. Ireland was not a holiday destinations for the Romans.
• The Castle was used by the British Monarchy until after the 1916 rebellion.
• We got to see a number of rooms.
• The hall is designed to look exactly like Versailles. It also resembles the halls of the old House of Lords (now Bank of Ireland) halls.
• The harp of Dublin faces the opposite direct form the Harp beer harp.
• The Castle is still used today – funny enough we haven’t yet been invited to any events. Clearly my evil step mother has hidden my invitation to the ball.

Inside the castle walls was an area called the Pale. That original space was slightly smaller than Trinity College is today. Christchurch was originally a Catholic church for the folks within the City walls. St Patrick’s Cathedral was for the others, who lived beyond the Pale.

We got to go into the original castle – the really old, built-by-Vikings castle. I took some pictures which may or may not have turned out so I included a little video (below). The original wall was built 1000 years ago. It is formed of bricks and a glue made of horse hair, egg, and animal blood.

Near the original wall we could see the Poddle, a river that runs underneath the Caste and the City of Dublin. It formed the original moat for the castle. The waters of the Poddle are murky and dark and formed a dark pool – or in Irish a Dubh Linn.

Here’s a test to see if Patrick reads the blog. Apparently Patrick’s family races back to the father of Red Hugh O’Donnell: In 1592, Red Hugh O’Donnell and Art O’Neill escaped from Dublin Castle via a drain into the Poddle, which runs under the Castle from Ship Street gate to the Chapel Royal and the Undercroft.

Anyways, seeing the original of part of the castle (which has only been open to the public since the 1990s) was the coolest part of the tour.

Tuesday night we had dinner at a very, very nice restaurant – Shanahan’s on the Green. It was very nice. The service was excellent. Their specialty is steak and my came medium rare – not over cooked at all. The price was too high for us for a Tuesday. I think we were the only ones in the place not an expense account.

Then we went to see Miss Julie at the Project Art Centre. We have seen some great shows and some terrible shows at the Project Art Center so we weren’t sure what to expect. They generally do modern and often experimental shows.

The show is originally by August Strindberg but this version was written by Frank McGuinness, one of Patrick’s teachers. The show was very dark but excellent.

On Saturday we saw one of the best plays for kids that I have ever seen – Beware the Storybook Wolves. You were supposed to be 6 years old to go – but we scored Aine a fake ID. I was worried that she would be too scared so (trying to cinch my mother of the year nomination) I had been desensitizing her all week by trying to scare her and talking about scary wolves.

She was well prepared. Actually I was nervous for a first few minutes but then the show was so funny that the scary parts weren’t so scary.

I won’t go into the plot – but there was a lot of running around and screaming. Somehow I think there were only 4 actors – so there were a lot of costume changes. When Prince Charming shows up, they played Prince Charming by Adam Ant, which I have been singing every since.

The show was at The Ark, a theater that really focuses on kids. Everything is kid-sized – the seats, the stairs, the toilets… The theater doesn’t seat very many people so you are very close to the action and the actors run all around the space.

We had lunch at the Meeting House Market – which means walking around with hotdogs and chocolate crepes. The girls loved it. Someone we seemed to eat a ton of garbage – but it was all good.

We got to see tons of men in kilts as the Scotland versus Ireland rugby match was on in town. Kilts are not for everyone. Knee high socks do not help the kilt look. Drinking a can of cider out of a bag on the bus in a kilt before noon – is not the classiest act I’ve seen in a week.

I dragged the kids to a show at The Project Act Centre Return Journey. Here the super quick description: 3 movie screens showing scenes from a train station, one person on a platform sometimes rolling around, sometimes tearing up red paper, sometimes folding and unfolding a little kid’s red shoe. There are 2 benches set up for the patrons to sit. Around the space, 2 actors walk around in a square taking off and putting on a hounds tooth coat.

To give the kids credit we sat and watched for about 10 minutes. I asked them to talk about the show in the video below.

At night Patrick and I went back into town. We found a place to sit in a pub in town and considered ourselves lucky. It was a low key but nice night.