DUBLIN

We flew from Singapore to London on one of the new qantas A380 planes, it was a bit freaky to be in the boarding lounge with so many people, the A380 holds 450 passengers. We left Singapore at midnight, we were very impressed with how quiet the A380 was and the landing was very smooth and quick. But the thing I liked best was the skycam which is a camera located on the top of the tail facing the front of the plane so we could actually watch the take off and landing and the whole flight live, if we had wanted to. The flight was 13 hours long and we were all bloody glad to land in Heathrow at 6.30 am London time, what a big place Heathrow is and we really only saw two terminals. We then flew straight to Dublin where the temperature was freezing, only about 8 degrees which was a shock after the 32 degrees we had had in Singapore. The road into Dublin from the airport was not very impressive and I thought Dublin was a bit of a dive, but after checking into our hotel we went for a long walk around the town and we were impressed by all the old shops and streets and realised what a lovely city it is. We had lunch at a popular area of Dublin called the Temple Bar, David and Joll had their first Guiness in Ireland. As it was Easter Sunday there was a parade in O'Connell Street, we thought it would be a religious parade but it was actually commerating the Easter Uprising of 1916, the army were there with their guns and there was heaps of security because the President of Ireland of there too. Later on in the afternoon the IRA were also having a protest in the street, we kept our heads down and hoped no bombs were going to go off!! We bought a two day on/off bus ticket which took us around all the attractions, we chose to visit St Patrick's Cathedral which was unbelievable, the history of the place was amazing, the cathedral as we see it today was built in the early thirteenth century!! It had lots of history and was like a museum as well as a massive church. It actually didn't have many seats and the seats had individual tapestry kneelers!! And in true catholic style it had a souvenir shop inside the front door, even had a priest serving customers! There was a chair in the cathedral which was from 1690! We walked around around Trinity College and David and Joll did the tour of the Guiness factory while Jenny and I went shopping in the big department store called Clery's and some other shops in the city. We stayed two nights in Dublin and really enjoyed the experience.