We just finished our little visit of Dublin and so far are very impressed with Ireland.
Dublin is a great place to visit with kids. It’s relatively flat, with beautiful old buildings and occasional wild life. This bird was photographed by our older son.
It has several very good museums, which are free and are within an easy walk of each other. First, we visited the Natural History Museum. It’s impressive and old-fashioned “Dead Zoo” museum, the kind we saw in Vienna years ago. But it needs an injection of “cool” – like interactive exhibits or some life – like a live beehive we saw in its Austrian counterpart. Still, it was fascinating and the kids were not disturbed by the dead animals as I was. The picture may suggest otherwise, but Jett just did not want to leave the museum and decided to plaster himself on the floor.
I liked the National Archaeology Museum better – it’s in a gorgeous building and had beautiful and fascinating exhibits of vikings’ gold. It also head some “Bog men” – mummified remains of people sacrificially slaughtered centuries ago and forensically analyzed. Perhaps not the best exhibit for kids. But the rest of the exhibits were very informative.
St. Stephen’s green – a huge park in the middle of the city with hundreds of pigeons, seagulls and swans. Jett could not believe his luck – finally, unrestricted access to pigeons who didn’t even fly away and merely waddled away from him, slowly.
We also visited our favorite museum – the National Gallery. It has a great area for kids to draw, it offers free and excellent guided tour of highlights, and it has an airy and cool cafeteria where one can work and eat in peace. After spending four days in Dublin, we moved on to our new home – in a little village Ballynacargy. It’s truly rustic out here – and more cows than people.
We do get SOME sunshine here, nothing like in Spain, of course. But it can get quite nice and the scenery is stunning. It’s a bit more rural than what we bargained for, but our cute little cottage has all modern conveniences and Irish people are some of the most optimistic and friendly people we’ve ever met. The food is delicious, too. It’s nice to see French, German, Italian, and Spanish foods in a supermarket, complimented by Irish own excellent farm goods. Deserts are great, too. So far so good.