bye bye dublin - last odds and ends to my trip

last day in dublin.. we went to the historic kilmainham gaol - a prison!, which was extremely fascinating! kilmainham gaol is one of the largest unoccupied prisons in europe and a common site for filming movies. it was also one of the first modern prisons - before kilmainham gaol, prisons were designed with basically one room in which all prisoners of all ages, no matter what their crime, were placed together. kilmainham goal was designed with the idea of isolation in mind. the cold limestone prison is loaded with tiny cell rooms with one window so deep and diminutive that you can't even see out of it. the prison was the main gaol for the imprisonment of many irish rebellion leaders and a site for many public hangings. the prison was closed in the late 1980's (i believe?) and has since been used exclusively as a museum.

 sturdy doors

 this room of cells may look familiar from some movies

the idea behind this design is "always seeing", every prisoner and cell can be seems from anywhere the guard is standing. 

this last picture is where the final executions took place in kilmainham. the final executions were by gun shot and the prisons who were executed were well known rebel leaders. their names were engraved on the stones close to the cross - this was equivalent to their grave stone.
i would definitely recommend this museum to any one visiting dublin! i loved it.
after we were finished the tour of the gaol and spent an hour or two in the museum we headed back to city centre.. which was about a 35 minute way i'd say. we stopped for coffee at a little shop on the way and walked around the city a little longer. there wasn't many other attractions or site seeing we needed to cover.. all we knew is we wanted to hit up temple bar at night for some live irish music. we went back to the hotel, got ready to head to temple bar - which was absolutely packed! we found some live music and looked everywhere for a table but to no avail. we squeezed three chairs into a tiny section at the bar and orders beers while we listened to some live irish music and once we got hungry enough, we left and went to eat dinner somewhere that we could actually get a table... it was the perfect way to spend our last day in dublin, ireland.
now that is officially the end to our amazing scotland/ireland trip. i loved every about it and although i'm so glad that becky is back in canada with us now, i do wish she would go back just so i can come visit again!

now on to dublin

FINALLY.. i am posting the last two days of my trip to scotland/ireland.. there are no excuses as to why this is so late.
back to wednesday june 5th.. we landed around 930 am at the dublin airport. we got our luggage, hopped in a taxi and headed over to our hotel. check in wasn't until about 2pm so we left our luggage in hotel storage and we went out to explore. we started off at trinity college.

trinity college dublin campus 

 we walked around the campus for a while but there wasn't much going on since it was summer. trinity is known for its beautiful, historic old library which all of us would have loved to stop in and check out but it cost money to get in! i think it was about 11 or 12 euros just to get in and see the library. none of us really thought it was worth it. after walking around trinity we went down to show becky the temple bar area and then found a little cafe for lunch. we visited dublin castle - which was disappointingly closed for some EU conference or something. there was a helicopter landing pad/park that was right around the corner from the castle entrance so we parked our bums down for a while and just relaxed in the sun (with about 60 others who were doing the same thing).
we didn't really have anything specific planned so we just did a lot of walking around.. we went in some shops, some book stores and while doing so - hunted around for a pub we could go to for dinner that had some live music.
after dinner we discussed our plans a for the following day and called it an early night.  honestly i don't think any of us felt very safe staying out until dark in that city. it felt very different than in glasgow or edinburgh.. we thought it best to just stay in and relax.