Ireland

Eddie had a very nice visit to Ireland! When we arrived on Monday, it was rainy, and rain was forecast all week. But Tuesday and Wednesday turned out to be very nice. Dublin is a very pretty city. On our return trip we'll have more time in Ireland and maybe we'll go outside the city.

Walking along the Liffey

Eddie set out to flirt with all the waitresses we met. Our first meal was at Copper Street Bistro, a nice place across the street from Old Christ Cathedral (we had bangers and mash, beef and Guinness stew, and shepherd's pie-pretty satisfying Irish meals!) The waiter wanted Eddie to give him high fives, but Eddie just smiled at him. But he started blowing kisses to the waitress as soon as he saw her!

Eddie had a little trouble settling down to sleep the first night—it was still daytime back home. But after he got to sleep, he slept till 9am, about 14 hours. Wow! Our hotel room has a full-length mirror, and when Eddie walked by he said "Baby - wooo!" He's very good at identifying babies and airplanes now.

A snack at the hotel

The second day, we took a bus tour. Now Eddie knows that fire trucks (his favorite vehicle) have sirens (which we say "wee-ooo, wee-ooo" but he says "wa-ohh, wa-ohh"), and he's picked up that sirens are loud. Unfortunately he seems to think all vehicles have sirens, so he tends to be a loud baby around traffic (like on a bus tour.) We're trying to point out that buses and trucks don't have sirens—hopefully he'll catch on!

Later that day we visited the old library at Trinity College, with its famous Book of Kells, and its fabulous long room full of two-story stacks of old books. Eddie liked the trees around there with huge gnarly trunks and magpies. Dublin has a lot of pedestrian streets, which he loves to walk along. He has no fear of walking right up to people, and doesn't seem bothered if his family is keeping up with him. He still needs to work on keeping out of people's way, which is hard in Ireland since nobody seems to know whether to walk on the right or left.

After the Book of Kells, Eddie decides where to go next

We had a lot of hearty breakfasts and lunches with lots of meats. Eddie had more meat at breakfast time than he's used to. I think he missed fruit—we'll get more of that in Italy!

This morning we walked to St. Stephen's Green, a very nice park with wooded isles that Frederick Law Olmsted would have envied, where Eddie enjoyed climbing and chasing ducks (and Nonno's hitherto unsuspected ability to talk like a duck.) After a last nap and a last sausage roll, we headed to the airport and Rome!