Hey guys! It's time for me to share all about our week off earlier this month with Jason's family! Our holiday consisted of many parts: first, we were staying at my parents' for a couple of days to celebrate my sister's 25th birthday, then we hopped on a plane to visit Jason's family in North Wales for five full days and left with the Capri to the Cotswolds before taking the ferry in Portsmouth and drive to our house! Oh yes, we didn't really have a minute to ourselves but we had such a good time. It really felt like it lasted forever though and I have so many photos to share with you!
Just after we arrived, Jason's parents organised a day trip to Dublin by taking the ferry from Holyhead, which was only 25mins away from their house. Handy! It was quite a long day as the ferry takes 3h to arrive and we of course took the first one available in the morning and the last one running in the evening. We didn't go to bed until 1.30am but it was all worth it :)
Here are a few photos!
We arrived around lunchtime in the rain, and it just didn't stop during the whole time we were there so we didn't spend much time outside! However, it was a good excuse to visit the many galleries dotted around Dublin.
We first stopped at the
Dublin City Gallery where I completely fell in love with the impressive architecture of the building and the tall elegant room with pastelly blue on its walls (as you can see!). They really had a good mix of artists and types of art and it was quite refreshing to find very traditional paintings alongside contemporary and abstract ones.
Also, we loved the fact that they had an exhibition about Francis Bacon and his way of working. They recreated the entirety of his studio as a perfect replica of how it was when Bacon left it. Quite amazing!
Jason and I started to feel pretty hungry so we took his parents to a very familiar place: Grand Canal Dock. This is where the festival OFFSET was taking place about 6 years ago and where we started to really get to know each other. Memories! We started dating just after going to this festival and the rest is history (haha). Anyway, we remembered that there was a really nice place called
Fresh which is a supermarket/deli where you can get pretty much anything you fancy. It was a hit! I had the most delicious salmon bagel there.
Once our bellies were full, we headed to the
National Gallery of Ireland which was also really good. Some of the paintings were much bigger than in the previous gallery and we could really see the details up close. I mean, how amazing are the details on the pieces of jewellery and clothes from one of the photos above? Amazing. We found plenty of art pieces that were really inspirational too and it's nice sometimes to look at different types of art that you wouldn't usually be interested in.
The
Natural History Museum was close by (and free!) so we went inside briefly and were lucky enough to be leaving it just when loads of school groups were entering! I always have mixed feelings going to these places because yes, it's really interesting and you might see some species of animal that you didn't know about, but at the same time, I feel a bit sad seeing these poor animals that most of the time were killed on purpose in order to be stuffed and exhibited there. Oh well! I loved the building though and I have to say, the exhibition was very well thought of.
After that we made our way to Temple Bar (obviously) and had a drink and some food at
The Old Storehouse, which was delicious, whilst listening to a guy singing some Irish songs! It was so lovely that I didn't want to leave but we had to get back to the ferry at a certain time and it would have been a shame to be late and miss it!
Hope you liked this little guide :). The two galleries we went to were also free and we used
DoDublin to get around town. A bit expensive but very handy when it's raining all day ;)
