Doors and Gates

Doors: One of the things I really find pretty in Dublin are the colorful doors. Lots of the brick and stone buildings in Dublin have brightly painted doors. Sometimes there will be a row or doors with a rainbow of colors. One house has a red door, the next a yellow, then a green. It adds a nice splash of color However there are also an excessive amount of doors in Dublin. They have something called "fire doors" which are supposed to contain fires in buildings. However, this means that there is a door whever there could possibly be one. To get in to my room I walk though the front door, go up the stairs, through another door at the top of the stairs, then I walk 5 feet to a door at the begining of the hallway, and finally I end up at the orange door to my room. They key hole is funny because it is at face level for me. It makes coming home with bags of groceries very difficult.






Gates: Where i live all the houses are pretty big and made of stone or brick. Along the sidewalk is a stone wall which varies in height from 3 to 7 feet tall. This means that each house has a gate to it's driveway. Here are example os some gates. The black gate is the gate to the residence of the embassador of Brazil who lives next door. The white gate is where I enter and exit Trinity Hall everyday.

Money!

Things with money are different here. For one thing change is worth a ton! A handful of change could be worth 20 bucks. They have 2 euro coins and i euro coins. Then there are 50, 20, and 10 cents coins which look brass. The copper coins include 5, 2, and 1 cent coins. All the coins are the same for countries which use the Euro however, each country decorates the face of the coin each with different designs. I found out they make a 500 euro bill! What would you do with that? Each of the bills are different sizes. They have a shiny bar across each. The top coin is from Spain and the other two are Italian

My First Views of Dublin

Initial thoughts:
The bus driver reminded me of my 4th grade teacher Jenny who had an English accent. The weather was surprisingly nice. There is a lot of old stone and brick buildings. They @ symbol on their key boards is near the " key not above the 2. Whenever I hear people talk I smile to myself. It really is very green. Even in the city.

The Beggining

Hello everyone,
So I thought I would give this a try. I will try and post pictures and give a bit of insight into my summer in Dublin, Ireland. So here I go:

Travel
It took me 24 hours of traveling to get to my hotel in Castleknock for my first night. I got to the airport at 5am San Jose time. I took about a 4.5 hour plane flight to Chicago. They played the movie "Alvin and the Chipmunks the Sqeakquel ". I chose not watch. I sat next two women who had their PHDs which I thought was pretty cool. One was a microbiologist and the other was an aeronautical engineer for the airforce. I spent my 5 hours reading in the airport before catching my second plane to Ireland! This time I sat next to a Trinity professor of drama. I thought this was a very cool coincidence. After making it thought customs I arrived in Dublin to a beautiful sunny day! I ended up taking a bus, a tram, a train, and a short taxi ride to my hotel.


This is the view from the plane! If you look close you can see the fields are lined with stones and bushes and are more
irregular.




Here is the bus driving down the LEFT side of the highway!




You probably can't tell but I am on the second story of the bus. All buses in Dublin are double decker. Though apparently they are not very dependable and often come late.










Below are more pictures taken from the bus. The river is the river Liffey which runs though the center of Dublin.

s
This is the pretty train stop in castleknock above. There was also a pretty stream next to it. Lots of wildflowers grew along the train tracks. My favorite are the pink ones which grow out of the stone walls. I had to wait a while for the train so I took a picture of myself. This is me heading back into town after checking in to my hotel. I had to get a converter for my plugs.