Hello Dublin!

The first step on our adventure is Dublin.  We have been so focused on moving to Italy and getting ready for life there that I had almost overlooked the fact that we have three weeks in Dublin and Ireland.  It is a great place to recover from jet lag and get used to a more European way of living.

After a long overnight flight that included a race through Toronto airport, our flight from SFO to Toronto was a couple of hours late, we arrived in Dublin on time.  I was worried that we would miss our connection which would have made for a rough start.  We are staying in an apartment in the neighborhood of Stoneybatter.

According to the stone down the road, "Stoneybatter once formed part of the ancient second century rode from Royal Tara to Glendalough, crossing the river at the ford of the Hurdles.  The name in Irish, meaning the road of the stones, has over time become Anglicized to present day Stoneybatter."  Now it is a little hipster neighborhood with shops and old brick row houses.  The majority of the houses appear to be Victorian.  The church around the corner, Aughrim Street Parish, was built in 1876.  It is quite lovely, but lovely neighborhood churches from that time are a dime a dozen in the city.

View from our front door

It is certainly a mix of the old and new.  Our apartment building is modern, but the row houses behind are old.  I can easily imagine it as an urban Victorian slum. There are small row houses with boot scrapers built into the walls near the doors.  A couple of streets up the houses are a bit bigger and set back off the street.  Farther up the houses are more separate and have space between them.  We ran across a boy leading a horse down a side street.  There is a carriage tour business nearby.  He was charming and a bit of old Ireland.  Clarke's City Arms pub just up the street is also delightfully old with it's hanging baskets and bright blue front.  There used to be a hotel on the spot with the same name and before that an estate owned by the Jameson whiskey family.  The hipster shops in Stoneybatter, the tech businesses, and our favorite fish and chip shop, run by Italian immigrants, definitely new Ireland.

On our first evening in town we took a walk to Pheonix Park.  It seems to be the Central Park of the city.  My Girl was thrilled to find a playground when we first arrived.  We played for a bit, then wandered around.

We found a large monument that we later learned is the Wellington Testimonial, a monument to the Duke of Wellington.  My Girl called it the Irish-ton monument since it is an obelisk like the Washington monument.  Among many other things the Anglo-Irish Duke became a hero during the Napoleonic wars and is famous for leading the victory of the British at the battle of Waterloo.  He was later the Prime Minister of the UK on two different occasions.

 On the plane I asked the kids what they were most excited about seeing or doing in Ireland.  Their answer, real Kinder eggs.  So we did, choking hazard toys and all.

More later...

Update:
John found a blog post on the history of our neighborhood.  (Follow the link for historical pictures)  Until the 1970s there was a very large cattle market on the corner of Prussia street and North Circular Road.  Cattle would be sold and run through the streets to nearby slaughterhouses or to the river where they were put on boats.  It is clear that the homes there are newer.  They have garages.  Cattle buyers and agents would stay at the City Arms hotel just up the street from our apartment.  The building is still there, but it is no longer a hotel.  The Clark's City Arms pub is still there.  The hotel is mentioned as the place the character Leopold Bloom lives for a time while working at the cattle market in James Joyce's Ulysses.