On the evening of Wednesday, August 21, 2019, we flew out of MSP on Aer Lingus, which had just recently begun direct flights from there to Dublin. The flight was uneventful, except toward the end, when a flock of swans delayed our landing for a substantial period. This was not disastrous, since our Dublin layover was scheduled to last eight hours and forty-five minutes. There was no way that Mary Joy could ever be persuaded to spend eight hours in an airport, so we put our bags in left luggage (pricey, because they would be there at the 24-hour rate, since the four-hour rate wouldn't work) and took the 747 Airlink bus downtown, getting off at O'Connell Street.
After picking up some euros at a bank ATM (nowadays, a lot of airports have franchised all their ATMs to exchange bureaus, so it pays, if you can, to get bank rates at a real bank ATM in town), we went to have lunch at our favorite Dublin pastry shop-cafe, Queen of Tarts, on Dame Street across from Dublin Castle. It was typical Dublin weather--cool and gray, with intermittent showers. After a good lunch, we walked a few blocks to Christ Church Cathedral, and paid the entrance fee to visit. We weren't impressed. Then we walked down to St. Patrick's Cathedral (I will not take the time to explain why Dublin, overwhelmingly Catholic, has not one but two medieval Anglican cathedrals, but no full cathedral and only a nineteenth-century Pro-Cathedral for the Catholics--like everything else in Ireland, it is complicated, and has to do with history). We decided not to visit there. Then we walked over to Grafton Street's pedestrianized shopping, ending at the entrance to St. Stephen's Green. Then we started back to O'Connell Street and the Airlink.
Mary Joy doesn't like Dublin. It's too gray and dreary for her tastes. Part of it is no doubt the weather--she may be more Irish than anything else, but the twenty-five percent of her ancestry that is from Greece appears to have asserted dominance as far as her European geographical preference is concerned: the sunny South trumps the northern mists every time--so far, she has managed to avoid Scandinavia completely, except for transiting through Copenhagen.
We caught the 5 p.m. Aer Lingus flight to Frankfurt, after about an hour delay. We took a regional train from the airport directly to Mainz, without going through Frankfurt itself. Hotel Hammer is directly across the Bahnhofplatz from the central train station. We asked the desk clerk where we could eat dinner, given that it was well after nine o'clock. He suggested Besitos, a tapas bar a block over on the square. That turned out to be a good idea, a fun place with good food.
After picking up some euros at a bank ATM (nowadays, a lot of airports have franchised all their ATMs to exchange bureaus, so it pays, if you can, to get bank rates at a real bank ATM in town), we went to have lunch at our favorite Dublin pastry shop-cafe, Queen of Tarts, on Dame Street across from Dublin Castle. It was typical Dublin weather--cool and gray, with intermittent showers. After a good lunch, we walked a few blocks to Christ Church Cathedral, and paid the entrance fee to visit. We weren't impressed. Then we walked down to St. Patrick's Cathedral (I will not take the time to explain why Dublin, overwhelmingly Catholic, has not one but two medieval Anglican cathedrals, but no full cathedral and only a nineteenth-century Pro-Cathedral for the Catholics--like everything else in Ireland, it is complicated, and has to do with history). We decided not to visit there. Then we walked over to Grafton Street's pedestrianized shopping, ending at the entrance to St. Stephen's Green. Then we started back to O'Connell Street and the Airlink.
Mary Joy doesn't like Dublin. It's too gray and dreary for her tastes. Part of it is no doubt the weather--she may be more Irish than anything else, but the twenty-five percent of her ancestry that is from Greece appears to have asserted dominance as far as her European geographical preference is concerned: the sunny South trumps the northern mists every time--so far, she has managed to avoid Scandinavia completely, except for transiting through Copenhagen.
We caught the 5 p.m. Aer Lingus flight to Frankfurt, after about an hour delay. We took a regional train from the airport directly to Mainz, without going through Frankfurt itself. Hotel Hammer is directly across the Bahnhofplatz from the central train station. We asked the desk clerk where we could eat dinner, given that it was well after nine o'clock. He suggested Besitos, a tapas bar a block over on the square. That turned out to be a good idea, a fun place with good food.
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