Another slow start to the day, but Perry was well enough to be up and about, so we did get to see a little bit of Dublin today. After a quick breakfast it was over to our good old tourist staple, the hop-on-hop-off bus, for a breezy trip around Dublin on a beautiful spring day (reaching the dizzingly scorching heights of 18 degrees).

I didn’t even take a billion photos. Perhaps unsurprisingly we drove past about 1000 churches give or take, plus some interesting things as well, like the Guinness factory, and a number of other old buildings around the place.

We grabbed some lunch at a place caller SuperMac’s – no it wasn’t full of Apple computers, instead of was a McDonaldKFCsubwayPizzaHut kind of place, trying to be all things to all people. Sure made a nice chicken burger though. We also saw a department store called Arnott’s – at first I had my hopes up that it was just five floors of biscuits, but alas no.

While we were in the neighbourhood we booked in to see The Long Room in trinity college. Just google that and you’ll get 1000 photographs better than mine :). To get in to the see The Long Room you also need to pay for an exhibit about the Book of Kells. There was no Book of Kath though. I guess the remarkable thing about the Book of Kells is that it was being put together in around the year 900 or so, and the pigments on the pages are still fairly vibrant – so it’s a wonder of archiving if nothing else. It’s interesting to see how people tried to draw things 1,000 years ago but the book itself is just some bits from the bible so to be honest that doesn’t hold a lot of interest. But still kinda cool to see an actual page from a 1,000 year old book. For some reason they had it open and one page and wouldn’t let you just pick it up and flick through to your heart’s content 🙂

After that, the Long Room itself. Just me, Perry, and a hundred other people, and staff who are currently in the process of removing all of the books so that they can be digitised and repaired if necessary. So perhaps it doesn’t give the full effect with a great many of the shelves empty, but it’s still a super-impressive space, 64 metres long, a beautiful vaulted ceiling, and room for a great many books. There were no ghosts whizzing about like in Harry Potter, no creepy atmosphere whatsoever, but it sure was beautiful, and old enough to have a filing system older than the letters J and U for example.

That was enough adventure for one day so back to the hotel to chill and regain some energy. We ventured as far as the ground floor for dinner, time to rest for a big day tomorrow.