>Looks like I'll have the chance to spend about a week in Dublin this
>Christmas (or the week after Christmas, actually). Does anybody have any
>advice, suggestions, or whatnot? I'm quite interested in investigating
>the local tipple, naturally, but also keen on seeing the sights. What's
>not to miss?
The Literary Pub Crawl shouldn't be missed. One can also go into Trinity College and see the Book of Kells and also the Long Room. St Patrick's Cathedral is famous for Swift's Memorial but I found the story of the Door of Reconciliation (through which the first arm was chanced) to be more moving.
There's also the Guiness Factory, the General Post Office where the Easter Uprising took place (perhaps the first recorded instance of going postal - it would have been more effective if it had more than sixteen people) and the James Joyce Museum within a Moletto tower in Dunleery (spelled Dun Laoghaire) just south of Dublin - but beware of the black panther (an Ulysses in-joke).
North of Dublin is Drogheda which is where Ollie Cromwell went berserk during the Civil War. From there you can visit the Newgrange tombs (ancient bronze age tombs - very orlanthi), Slain (where Patrick defied Irish Druids by lighting the Paschal Flame) and the Boyne Valley where William of Orange and James II fought a battle (it would have been decisive had not James II decided beforehand that he was going to lose and send the big guns southward). You can pretty much do that in a day (I hired a mountain bike for a round trip of 28 kilometres and almost got killed by a car).
--Peter Metcalfe
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