Book Worms

We had a wonderful meal last night at The Winding Stair, a local place located above a book store. It is a quaint restaurant with a neighborhood feel that serves up simple, high quality Irish food. When one thinks of Irish food, corned beef, cabbage, and Lucky Charms probably come to mind, but generally it seems it’s a lot of fish (often smoked), meat (beef or pork), and potatoes done many different ways. The atmosphere of the place was great though, even if it was a little loud, and we really enjoyed ourselves.

We spent our Saturday walking the city and seeing most of the highlights. We lucked out with amazing weather. The temperature was in the mid 60’s and the sun was shining the entire day. Irish eyes were smiling upon us apparently.

We walked from our hotel through St Stephen’s Green, which is a beautiful little park. Again, the weather helped, but the flowers were all in bloom, tons of ducks were swimming in the ponds, and there were people out on the lawns enjoying the nice weather. Walking down Grafton Street, I thought a lot about the movie Once, which was filmed here, and had several scenes on this street. It’s a great movie if you’ve never seen it.

Lunch was at the Fallon and Byrne Food Hall. It is kind of a Dean & Delucca-ish place that also had a café upstairs. We passed on the café and ate at their lunch counter. My club sandwich was pretty decent, as was Jenn’s chicken and mushroom soup. It made us wish there was something like this in Bratislava.

The General Post Office was nothing more than an old post office, but we bought postcard stamps there, so it served its purpose. We saw the book of Kells at the Trinity College Library. It’s a really old book and that’s cool, but besides that, I didn’t get too much out of it. The old library, however, was a sight to see. It’s a beautiful room with a high wooden ceiling, filled with shelves and shelves of old books. It looks a lot like an old church. It didn’t smell nearly as bad as I thought it would. I don’t know why I thought it would smell bad, but I always associate old books with a stale, musky odor.

We strolled through Temple Bar, which is the touristy area, but I didn’t find it overly offensive. We found a little farmer’s market. Jenn found a crepe and I found a woman with her breast hanging out of her shirt feeding her child with no attempt at covering up. I guess that’s how they do it here. We walked through Dublin Castle and stopped in at the Chester Beatty Library. I thought that my mother would be really pleased with the fact that I visited two libraries in one day. This one wasn’t much of a library. It was a collection of one man’s books and art, all related to different religions from around the world. Jenn and I discussed that we need to start collecting something besides souvenir spoons (her) and golf balls (me), because no one is going to want that crap when we’re gone. I heard a story on NPR recently when I was back in US about a guy who collected mustard jars for years and how there is a mustard museum with his entire collection, so I guess you never know.

The Kilmainham prison was very cool. It’s an old jail built at the end of the 18th century where prisoners were kept, mostly for rebelling against the British in the fight for independence. They’ve done a good job maintaining it and it makes for a really interesting tour. Jenn got a kick out of the cells for some reason as you can see below.

Dinner that evening was at an Italian place called Dunne and Crescenzi. It’s a cute, relatively authentic Italian restaurant. It wasn’t amazing, but not too bad either. We split bruschetta, a caprese salad, and lasagna. I use the term "split" loosely as we had the cut the dinner short and ask the waiter to pack up everything to go because Jenn was having stomach issues. The only amusing part of the situation was the waiter handing us the three to-go containers and saying to Jenn in his Italian accent, "I hope it wasn't the mozzarella."

Again, we couldn’t have been luckier with the weather. We always talk about what an impact it has on how much we do or do not enjoy our experience in a city. We’re going to explore some of the coastal towns tomorrow. Hopefully, we can get one more good day of weather.