Ireland day 0161. Tuesday 08 March 2022- Novelties

Ireland day 0161. Tuesday 08 March 2022- Novelties
Today’s summary Went into Dublin for meeting with accountant but they cancelled at last minute for unavoidable reasons.   Spent the day quickly checking out a few city highlights that we hadn’t already visited.   Spanish in evening
Today’s weather Very windy, overcast and wet in the morning.   By mid afternoon it had calmed down, the rain stopped, and a bit of sun came out.   About 7C
Today’s overview location
(The blue mark shows the location of my route in the morning)
Close-up location
(The green line shows where I walked in the morning)
(Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected):
Dublin novelties walk
Commentary

One of the particular joys of moving to and living in a foreign country is tax.   Like most people, I am not a particular fan of filling in tax forms, and even less a fan of actually paying it.   But it’s the price you pay for living in a functioning society I guess, so really there’s no alternative.

When you leave the UK and are away for more than 91 days, you are no longer tax resident there, so that means that in our case we will end up paying tax in Ireland.   It’s quite hard to find definitive advice on how exactly you manage your tax affairs when you move to Ireland – something that I actually find quite surprising given that hundreds if not thousands of people must do it every year.

So we are going to take the easy way out and pay accountants in the UK and in Ireland to sort it all out for us.   Well at least I hope it will be the easy route, because sometimes with paid help like this I know you can end up having to do 99% of the work yourself and then paying them for the privilege as well.   Hopefully it won’t end up like this, so we are going to give it a try.

While Val is away ski-ing (it’s going very well, by the way!), I decided to start the ball rolling by arranging to meet up with our Accountant in Dublin today.   As it happened the accountant had to postpone the at the last minute for unavoidable reasons, but at least the pressure of the meeting had forced me to get my act together a bit and try and pull our financial affairs into some sort of order.   The meeting will be rescheduled in a couple of weeks’ time.   But by the time I got notice of the postponement, I was already in Dublin and as it was only 11 am, I had most of the day at my disposal and I decided to make the most of it by trying to visit some of the novel sites in Dublin that we hadn’t visited before.   The only constraint was my Spanish class in Portmarnock at 7pm this evening.

My first objective was actually to do a bit of shopping.   I had lost my hat on the Cooleys walk and needed to get a replacement one (you can see it in the photos below).   I did manage to find one in an outdoor sports shop but not before I had come across a Spanish gourmet shop Capel St (there’s also a bigger one in Camden St I believe) where I had to make a detour to do a quick exploration.   As I was in a Spanish frame of mind given tonight’s impending lesson, I picked up some nice looking wafer thin jamón de cebo campo ibérico (it’s a bit like parma ham but better) which will go well in my sandwiches tomorrow.

Exhausted by all this shopping (believe me buying some ham and a hat is a lot for me) I beat a retreat to my favourite café at Fegan’s 1924 where I had intended just to get a cup of tea.   Needless to say the cup of tea became two cups of coffee, a sausage roll and two pastries.   Call me weak willed, but, hey, you only live once.   Refreshments dispatched and digested, I decided to wander up to the City Hall – a magnificent Georgian building on Dame Street just below the castle – and see if I could have a look around.   You can see the results in the pictures below – it is sort of open, in that you can poke your nose inside, but you can’t explore thoroughly.   A shame, as a it’s a really impressive building.

Next on the list was St Stephen’s Green – a small but beautiful garden square in the middle of Dublin, right outside the uber-posh Shelbourne hotel (€400 a night, by the way).   It’s a bit like London’s St James’ Park in miniature and was looking particularly attractive today as by the thime I visited, the sun had come out.   After a bit more wandering about (and definitely no more shopping), I ended up by having a look at the National Library of Ireland.   I think I will have to come back to this particular edifice at a later day – and Val is sure to want to visit too – because to see the most interesting part, which is the Reading Room, you have to make an appointment.   You can however visit the W. B. Yeats exhibition in the basement but I didn’t linger as I have to admit, to my shame, I’m not really a fan of his writing.

I should add by the way that the gents toilets are well worth a visit if you are ever in the library.   They are truly a sight to behold, complete with gleaming copper pipework, acres of porcelain, and an easy chair to relax in once you have finished your ablutions.   They alone made the journey worthwhile.   I can’t vouch for the ladies’, I’m afraid.

I finished my exploration at that point and headed over to Pearse station for the DART to Malahide, and was back in the flat by 4pm, ready to start cooking dinner and making preparations for tomorrow’s excursion.   You will just have to return in 24 hours time to find out what all that is about.

(By the way I’m back from Spanish now (evidently) – the joy of being able to drive there in 5 minutes rather than taking the best part of an hour to walk is immeasurable).

 

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)

Sometimes you could almost convince yourself you were in Vienna.  This is Sunlight Chambers – once the home of the Lever Bros Dublin HQ, and the murals on the walls celebrate the virtues of cleanliness and washing – presumably with Sunlight soap.   It’s just by the south end of Grattan Bridge and today I think it’s a district family court Had to stop off in Fegan’s obviously.   The hat on the right is my latest acquisition – I managed to lose my original one on the Cooleys walk a couple of weeks ago, and took the opportunity of being in Dublin to get a replacement.   My DWC membership delivered another 15% off, which was very nice
Entrance to St Stephens Green.   One of Dublin’s “smartest” parks, a bit like St James’ in London.   It was originally opened in the 1700s for local residents only, but thanks to the philanthropy of Lord Ardilaun, of the Guinness family, it was gifted to the public in 1880.   Like City Hall, below, it played an important role in the uprising of 1916 Spring felt to be well and truly here, in St Stephens Green.  We have probably just about reached “peak daffodil”
National Library of Ireland, on Kildare Street.   It is the mirror image of the National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology, which sits just a couple of hundred meters opposite, on the other side of the square.   In between is Leinster House, seat of the Irish National Parliament.   You are allowed in the foyer and into the W. B. Yeats exhibition in the basement, but not into the reading room itself.    I really like these gold lettered signs over the gates to Irish national monuments.  There’s one at the archaeology museum next door, and a similar one down at the botanic gardens
Inside the magnificent City Hall, just by the castle.   It was originally the Royal Exchange and it opened 1779.   It was supposed to have an open hole in the top like the Pantheon in Rome but Dublin was deemed too rainy to make that viable.   After the Act of Union in 1801, the Irish economy went into decline and the Exchange was closed.   It was converted to the City Hall in 1852 and played a prominent role in the various battles for independence between 1916 and 1922.   Nowadays, some Dublin City Council meetings take place there, but its main function seems to be as a wedding venue.   It’s an absolutely magnificent building, but you are only allowed to poke your nose in through the front door – there are no tours or other visits allowed
Interactive map

(Elevations corrected at  GPS Visualizer: Assign DEM elevation data to coordinates )

Total distance: 4064 m
Max elevation: 21 m
Min elevation: 4 m
Total climbing: 93 m
Total descent: -95 m
Total time: 01:03:11
Download file: Dublin Wander 2 corrected.gpx

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