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Things to do and see in Dublin

Just my humble opinion, but if you ever find yourself in Dublin, Ireland here are a few suggestions to get you started (besides the obvious Guinness and Jameson tours).

In regard to those, I never did make it on the Jameson tour, but I did do the Guinness one. It *is* interesting if you’ve not done any other brewery tour before, but if you have one is somewhat like another. That being said, the bar where you drink your complimentary half-pint at the end is on an upper storey and commands a spectacular view of the city. So if the Irish weather is not too dreadful to see anything, it’s worth it just for this view.

The other typical thing to do of course when it comes to night-life is to visit the Temple Bar area. While some may say this is also very touristy, so what. It is always busy and you can have fun counting the British hen parties. ;)

I’d say my two favourite temple bar pubs are The Foggy Dew and of course the Porter House, Temple Bar. The later especially is always packed and always a good time. And on weekends always has good live rock.

For a slightly different take on night-life, sadly one of my favourite places has closed down since I was there: Floridita was an incredibly fun salsa club. The closest next best thing I know of would be SamSara Cafe in Dawson St. And Cafe En Seine a few doors along is also worth a visit.

But what about other things to fill the daylight hours? Well of course Grafton Street always has a few buskers, but then you get the same in any big European city and it’s not a very long street. However, being spring time now, if the weather is at all semi-decent then taking a leisurely stroll through St. Stephens Green is a must! It’ll be beautiful.

Also not to be missed if at all possible is a visit to Trinity College Old Library. While the main attraction there is the ancient Book of Kells, I found the Library itself to be quite spectacular too, especially the Long Room.

Slightly less mainstream and a little more macabre is to visit the very unassuming St. Michan’s Church and view the mummies in the vault.

Finally (for now), sticking with the churchy theme, an interesting place for a lunch or dinner is The Church Restaurant.

Two new tools (for me)

I discovered two nifty new (to me) Linux command-line tools today. Both were simply apt-get-able for me on Intrepid, but I’m sure most distros should have packages. The two are:

Hello again blog(s)

I’ve gone off the over-frequent twitter updates somewhat lately and also been wanting to get down a few things that are a bit longer than 140 characters. Thusly, this is the obligatory once-every-6-months-or-so “I’m going to blog again” post.
For now, I’ll use Tumblr as my Wordpress site is a bit broken. Although posts here will still get pulled into the WP feed and thus in Parks and Readers too. Yay for aggregation.

A moment of silence..

.. for a sad loss in rock history. Good bye to Rick Wright who’s music will always be loved and enjoyed.