Tynanwoods Day Fifteen

October 29, 2006
Day 15: Butt tag on the green; goose bumps in the Temple Bar

Our first full day in Dublin. It began with the view of some streetperson on the corner of St. Stephens and Leeson on all fours with his forehead on the sidewalk and his bare ass in the air. I quickly herded the kids across the intersection to St. Stephens Green, a beautiful 22-acre park on the edge of Dublin's touristy heart.

The kids and I played 'butt tag' (fully clothed) in the park while Xtina caught up on her email in the hotel lobby. Then we bopped up and down Grafton Street, an open-air pedestrian mall filled with familiar brand names -- McDonalds, Burger King, Nine West -- and our first siting of a Starbucks in Ireland. Grafton Street bustles; people here walk with a purpose, in straight lines at high speed. It's like being in New York, only the accents are more charming. Once again the gravitational vortex sucked Xtina into shoe stores.

In the evening we met up with my 24 friends and relations at Botticelli's, an Italian joint in Temple Bar, the nightlife district along the River Liffey. But we were assigned exactly one waitress for our 28 diners, so we ended up eating in shifts. Afterward about half of our party headed back to the hotel while the rest hunted for a bar large and empty enough to accommodate us. In Temple Bar the night before a Bank Holiday this proved to be difficult -- it's a big party night in a big party town. Eight of us finally made it to a semi-empty bar on the far end of the district, where we had a pint and called it a night.

Many of the Temple Bar revelers wore Halloween costumes, including several scantily dressed girls who would have looked quite at home at San Francisco's Exotic Erotic Ball, despite an ambient temperature of around 45 degrees fahrenheit. The final score for the night: the legendary hardiness of the Irish 1, puritanical Catholicism 0.