Yep thats right. However not the Hollywood you are all probably thinking of. The one from the Cheiftans song, the one in Wicklow county. Ok I haven't written for a couple of days so I have a little to catch up on. My only excuse is that I forgot yesterday. So I'll back track a little. We caught the bus across from Galway ok, this time managing to pick up lunch on the way to the bus stop so it was a lot less painful a trip this time. Also this time we're in the section of the building behind the red door, which is great because it means that instead of having to ask reception to open the door (like the black door) you just push the buzzer and they can ping it open from inside. The first night in there we had a chatty Dutch man who talked very fondly of NZ, having lived there back in the 80s. He was a wandering soul type. He told a story about driving a cab around Amsterdam and one day just getting tired of it and ringing his old boss in NZ and asking if he had a job going and 2 weeks later he was in NZ. Nice for some, not the life for me I think.
Yesterday we again made the fatal mistake of forgetting days of the week. So we arrived on Sunday and went to do washing but the place was closed. We rearranged our tour to do today so we could do our laundry yesterday (the most expensive laundry place so far unfortunately, almost twice what we've ever paid before). After handing in our dirty clothes and told we could get them back clean at 3 we came back to decide what to do with the day. The national museum and national gallery were both free and right next to each other so we started there. Again the days of the week tripped us up, the national museum was closed. The national gallery wasn't, though only had a couple of rooms open because of renovations. It was still quite good though, saw another Picasso and another Monet, and a few Irish artists, and a French artist that was in the Irish section that I quite liked (we'd seen him before in Vienna).
Since we had the whole afternoon free we headed off to Kilmainham gaol which I really wanted to see. We caught the tram, which they call the Laos here, and which we discovered didn't stop as close to the gaol as the map implied. But we got there, and did the tour. It was a very good tour, they took you all through the gaol, the 200 year old section and the more modern section, and told you a decent amount of history about it, including the easter rising stuff. You also got taken outside to the yard where the easter rising leaders were executed - and told the story of how James Connolly was dying from blood poisioning and a few other things, but they still strechered him in, and when he couldn't stand tied him to a chair to execute him. The story of course stirred up a bit of bad feeling. Nice work British.
We survived the day of feeling a bit over tired and pissy with the world, and the nights sleep seemed to help us both, and today we went on the tour of Wicklow and Kilkenny. It was a good tour, though we ended up with 2 and a half hours in Kilkenny with no idea what to do. We wasted and hour having a pub lunch, and I got a chance to try a Kilkenny beer, quite a good beer actually. The castle up there was pretty impressive, though our bus driver advised us not to bother doing the tour because he said all the stuff inside was replicas.
On the way up to Kilkenny we stopped in a couple of places for photo stops, and one longer stop for just over an hour at a place called Glendalough. It was beautiful. We got dropped down by the lakes and wandered around the paths there for a little while coming upon an old church, and then walked back up to the hotel to the bus again, going through the Monastic city which was very cool. The churches and castles in Ireland seem to be a lot older than any others we've come across so far. We made it back to the hotel in time to get coffee (yay) and a very good muffin/scone.
I should also tell you about our busdriver/tour guide Mike. I loved him, very funny, very Irish. As we drove out of Dublin he displayed his scorn for; the English, the rich; and the Irish politicians. The rich were 'the hooty tooty, heads up there arses' folks. The politicians were the money wasters building useless spikes (he gave it a bunch of brilliant names non of which I can remember). The jokes continued throughout the trip, I'm when I get home and start remembering more you'll hear them.
One last day in Dublin tomorrow, then the long mission to get to London, the longest bit being the trip from the airport to the hostel. Then its just a couple of days till I leave!
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