Have a half day in Dublin? Your day may look something like this.

 

Arrive at the airport and head to the information desk to inquire about buses to the city. Realize that even though you only know 300 or so Italian words after living in Italy for 2 months, you understand more Italian than you do Irish English. Shit.

Grab a bus to the city, quickly check into the hostel and head to Trinity College to view The Book of Kells.

Spend an hour reading about and looking at The Book of Kells and staring in awe at the Long Room in Trinity College’s Library. Or if you’re not a librarian, spend half an hour.

Browse Trinity College’s shop and buy an Irish cookbook for a family member. Keep your fingers crossed that they will make you something.

Walk around Trinity College’s campus and imagine yourself as a student at an 800-year-old institution.

Drop the cookbook off at the hostel and head to the main shopping area of Dublin. It’s a beautiful sunny Saturday and everyone seems to be wandering down the pedestrian friendly street.

Hungry? Grab a scone to go from a café along the river.

Admire the Spire of Dublin. Think about the other shiny monuments, specifically those that are millennium monuments, but weren’t completed until the millennium was a few years old (Chicago’s Millennium Park and London’s Millennium Footbridge).

Look at dresses in a cute store and try a couple on. Realize that after spending 2 months in Italy eating gelato almost every day now is NOT the time to be shopping. Run away. Get excited that you will soon have a schedule where you can exercise on a regular basis.

Fight the temptation to buy Toblerone from the woman selling it in an old baby carriage even though you don’t like Toblerone.

Purple garbage trucks!

Admire (or cringe at) the shiny silver painted lampposts. Dublin, really?

Europe 2011 300x231 6 Hours in Dublin

6 Hours in Dublin September 2011

Cross the river to Dublin Castle. It’s closed for the day so you can’t go in, but walk around the grounds and admire it from the outside.

Walk over to Christ Church and listen to the bells play a tune. Or something resembling a tune. To you it sounds like someone is randomly pulling the bells’ ropes.

Notice the teenagers with beer cans in the small park beside Christ Church. Beer cans are casually thrown around the grass. Quench the urge to tell them to pick up after themselves.

Head to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. After being astounded at the €5.50 entrance fee, decide that an 800-year-old church probably hasn’t changed much in the 9 years you last saw it. Walk out.

Stroll through St. Stephen’s Green. Realize the one thing you have missed most while living in Italy is diversity and individual expression. In Ireland, you see nuns, people dressed to the tee, goths and even a teenager in a tiger costume. Perhaps the tiger was celebrating Halloween a month early?

Realize that though you were too pale in Italy, now with your slight summer tan, you are too tan in Ireland.

Head to a tourist desk to inquire about the Haunted History tour. Decide NOT to go on the tour because you’re too scared.

Eat a humongous dinner at a traditional Irish pub and down it with a cider. Or a Guinness. Or both. Decide because it didn’t include pasta, pizza or tomatoes that it’s one of the best meals you’ve had in two months.

After dark, wander through the streets surrounding Trinity College and cringe at (or admire?) the students who are already half drunk so early in the night. It’s only the first week of the term! Wait… didn’t you hang out with university students in Pisa just last week???

 

I wouldn’t recommend only spending half a day in Dublin, the city and country need much more time, but sometimes flight schedules only allow a short layover. Luckily, I had visited Ireland in 2002 and had seen most of the important sites in Dublin at that time.