If Opa and I had tickets leaving at the same time as everyone else on this flight this would be the day that we leave back for home, but we didn't. So instead of going back home this day we spent it walking around the city sight seeing. We visited their national museum of art, which had some truly amazing art in it, but sadly we were not permitted to take photos inside. Grafton Street is an area of a few blocks south of the College Green that are off limits to cars and are a playground to pedestrians with a wide range of street performers and shops for anything you could imagine. The National Museum of Archeology and History is the largest of Dublin's museums and has extraordinary artifacts spanning the last two millennia. One room gleams with the Tara Brooch, the Ardagh Hoard, and other Celtic gold work. Another section is devoted to the Republic's founding years and flaunts the bloody vest of national hero James Connolly. In Temple Bar we visited Dublin's only Gallery of Photography. It is above an extensive photography bookstore. The walls of this four story gallery are lined with contemporary photographs by Irish and some international photographers. We stopped to take pictures of a the statue of James Joyce and visited one of the old Victoriana houses open to the public showing how people used to live when the houses were first built. Overall I think our last day in Dublin was our most productive. We even had a chance to stop for some Fish and Chips for lunch as we watched the gay pride festival going on across the green.
This extremely large spike is a sculpture placed in the middle of downtown Dublin. The locals like to call it the stiletto in the ghetto. It is so amazingly tall that you can't see all of it at once. I'm not sure what it is there for and as far as I can tel neither does any one else.
