St. Stephen's Green

It's been a good week over here. Last night I went to the movies with a couple of guys. I went to a play on Saturday night with some other folks. I'm having fun here. And studying. That too.

I feel a little bad for complaining about the weather. It's been really nice for the most part since my last post. Also, they turned the boiler on in my house, so I have heat now. Sometimes a bit too much, but it's nothing than an open window won't fix.

I found what is probably my favorite place to eat here. It's called Cornucopia and is entirely vegetarian. I realize that my feelings on this matter may be difficult for meat-eaters to understand (because you have choices everywhere, right?), but I get really excited when I have more than three or four things to choose among on a menu. And this is a whole restaurant devoted to vegetarian food. It's truly a wonderful place. I have a hard time not ordering everything on the menu when I go there.

I think that I promised you city park pictures, didn't I? Well, here they are:

This is the bridge over the lake in St. Stephen's. I walk over this every day that I have class.







Here's a picture taken from that bridge. I think one of those kids in the middle left of the picture is giving me the skunk eye for pointing a camera in his general direction. If he is, that's a little strange because cameras are always blazing in this place; somebody took a picture of Front Arch at Trinity just as I was coming out today, so I know I'll be prominently featured in that vacation photo. In my opinion, the skunk eye kid should be used to this sort of thing.


This is the backdrop for the statue of Theobald Wolfe Tone, an Irish patriot/rebel from the late eighteenth century, and for the Great Famine memorial. I hear the locals refer to it as 'Tonehenge' after Theobald and that they don't really like it. It's not the most beautiful thing, but I think it helps to screen this corner of the park from the outside (things like the rest of the crane in the top right of the photo), so I like it. I didn't bother with taking ol' Wolfe Tone's picture. I did take a picture of the Great Famine memorial statue on the inside of the park. Here it is:













This is one of the most serene places in the park. I can almost forget that I'm in a million person plus metro area if I slip out here on a good day. There's a little staircase on the other side of the lake that takes you to the top of that rock in the center of the picture, and that is a really nice place. If you can catch it unoccupied, it's about as far as you can get from the city life in the middle of Dublin

This is the middle of the park where you can see all the Dubs enjoying what really was a very nice day here (taken over a week ago).



I like this picture because it shows cranes over the top of a view of the middle of the park. I hope this shot helps to give an impression of St. Stephen's as very much situated in the middle of a city. There aren't many tall buildings in Dublin, so nothing of that sort peaks over the trees here, but the entrances to the park are just yards away from busy shopping areas and business parks.

Here's the fence and sidewalk where I leave the park. As you can see, a black wrought-iron fence divides the city from the park and makes for a pretty sharp delineation between the two areas. I think if you look closely, you can see cars in the far left of the photo. Major roads run around St. Stephen's on all sides. I realize that the pictures are piling up now and that this post is getting rather long, but I just have one more.


Looking across the road from the last picture, I came up with roughly this view. I threw it in because I like the effect of the leaves changing on the its vines. If this building is important (to anyone apart from the people who work there) for anything historic or cultural, I don't know about it. I think it looks neat though. These are the types of buildings that surround the whole of St. Stephen's Green. However, most lack the greenery.

That's all I've got for today. Keep me posted on what's going on in your worlds.