Europe Day 3

I actually took pictures today!!!  Hooray!  I slept in again this morning (I am on vacation, after all!), then went back into the city center.  The first thing I did was stop and get a tattoo . . .

I had been planning on doing this for a while and had already picked out what I wanted, so I went prepared.  It didn't hurt as bad as I thought it would and it only took about 10 minutes to do.  After that I walked over to the Famine Memorial on the banks of the River Liffey.  This was one of the things I was most looking forward to seeing . . .

After that I joined up with one of the hop-on, hop-off bus tours.  I skipped the first few stops, but got off at Christ Church Cathedral.  The highlights of Christ Church, for me, involved dirty laundry and a dead cat and rat.  In the crypt of the church, they had some of the costumes from The Tudors, which had apparently filmed scenes there.  Seeing Jonathan Rhys Meyers' dirty laundry made this whole trip worth it.  Sorry the pics are so dark, but like I said, we were in a crypt.  There tends to not be a whole lot of light down there.

And here are the cat and rat.  I guess curiosity really did kill the cat!

Next I went to St. Patrick's Cathedral, which was the site of something else I had been looking forward to seeing; The Door of Reconciliation.  You can read the story below.

  

A few other pics from St. Patrick's:

After St. Patrick's, I hit up the whole point of the bus tour:  Kilmainham Gaol.  I won't go into the whole history of the place, but there were many political prisoners held there, including many who were executed for the Easter Rising in 1916.  Parts of In the Name of the Father (which is a great movie and book, btw-seriously, look it up!) were also filmed there. 

One thing about the jail that I thought was kind of interesting was that the prisoners could only use the spiral staircase.  They specifically designed it with that staircase because you can't run, get into fights, or otherwise cause problems as easily on a spiral staircase.  By the time I got to Kilmainham, the weather was starting to turn pretty cold and after being in this limestone, freezing-cold building for an hour and a half, I was ready to head home.  I finished up the bus tour, which thankfully let out close by where I pick up the bus.  I warmed up on the bus a bit, so I stopped at a Chinese restaurant around the corner from the apartment, and had dinner there.  I love that in Europe they always seem to have early bird specials where you can get a starter, main dish and dessert for a set price.  Given the price of decent restaurants in this part of the world, it makes things a lot easier on the pocketbook/credit card! 

P.S. For the record, I'm not going to be revising any of these traveling blog posts as I'm too tired by the time I write them, so I apologize for any errors they may contain!