Dubliners

We became Dubliners for three days at the beginning of the week, thanks to ridiculously low priced tickets from a budget airline. M had been to Dublin thirty years ago, but I had never been to Ireland before. We loved it! A lovely relaxed place to explore, with incredibly helpful and friendly people.

Our 10 year old is on a mission to visit the zoo whenever she goes to a new city, so we agreed rather reluctantly to include Dublin Zoo in our schedule. It proved to be one of the nicest zoos we have visited, beautifully landscaped and with animals who seemed as chilled and friendly as the people. One super-relaxed grandmother gorilla had even settled down for a nap right next to the glass separating her enclosure from the human visitors, apparently oblivious to the horde cooing over the snoozing baby gorilla in her arms.

We visited Dublin Castle, only to find ourselves in the middle of the set of a TV series about the Easter Rising of 1916, populated by authentically costumed extras who were staving off boredom with rather anachronistic mobile phones and paper coffee cups. We didn't get to see any filming unfortunately - all the extras knew was that they had already been hanging around for a long time and nothing seemed to be happening!

Other highlights were the trams (our hotel was some way out of the centre on a tram route), a build-your-own-stir-fry Mongolian BBQ restaurant, and a walk-in science workshop where N learned to solder and built an electronic voice recorder.

Even the weather smiled on us, with no rain and a respectable amount of sun.