C and I loved Ireland, but the weather made our 4-day trip hard work. She's been sleeping it off most of today.
Tuesday we spent in Dublin mostly, looking round Trinity College and the city. The College looks very solid and eminent; maybe less desperately elitist than Oxbridge colleges though very hard to get into. Or maybe the postgraduate students showing us round were so friendly and down to earth that they made the whole place seem more welcoming. I can see why C dreams of going there, but she's not at all sure what to expect of last month's exams and knows Trinity may well remain a dream. As cities go, we liked Dublin too - there were crowds of other tourists of course, like us - or rather, not like us: mostly American - but it still seemed more spacious, less hurried and of a more manageable size than places like London or Manchester. We walked on the waterside paths, didn't do the Guinness tour, and took the bus to Wicklow.
Wicklow suited us just fine. It's a little town with a working harbour, a pebble beach, a golf course and some industry; unpretentious and not touristy; rather like Peel without the kippers and trippers. The main street is lined with small shops, making you think small-scale enterprise is coming back after all, back to the 1960s. But we were told it's a facade - the shopkeepers had agreed to keep their window displays going, rather than boarding them up, even though the doors were locked and the shelves empty, so as not to deter people from coming to the place altogether; the Irish economy is as dire as the media says it is. No wonder it felt so quiet and the people had plenty of time for us clumsy English visitors - the qualities we so liked about the place weren't altogether a blessing for it.
We did some walking in the hills and by the sea, and would have liked to do a lot more, but we weren't equipped for the weather, got soaked to the skin both days, and never really dried out properly, as the hostel we were staying in was warm and cosy but didn't have enough space or radiators to cope - that's what made the trip rather hard work.
On Friday it was still raining, so we decided to go back to Dublin to find indoor things to do before catching our plane back to Manchester that evening. This amounted mainly to McDonald's, the Natural History Museum (old-fashioned; full of fossils and endearing but moth-eaten stuffed animals, and the information texts hadn't changed much since the 1950s either) and window shopping. Fortunately the rain eased off.
We got back to find a hole in the lounge ceiling. A leak from the shower or bath had worked its way through the plaster board to stain the ceiling. Dave had prodded it with a screwdriver, and down it came. Again.
And it's still raining.
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