Ireland Trip

This week has been a great week for me, I’ve been to Dublin Ireland on a business trip, and trust me I wasn’t so pleasant that um going there at first. Knowing that I’m going where the farmers of UK are living, hating the English people a lady made me sick of the idea.

However, after talking to someone who’s actually been there and lived for a while to know about Dublin, I started to change my mindset a bit and accept the fact that I might get some fun over there.

It starts on the 1st of May 2011, where my friend and I left the Cairo airport on LuftHansa flight towards Frankfurt airport for a connecting flight the to Dublin.

Having mtarted from Cairo I have to say what happened there , well to put it simple and easy, I forgot my passport inside the scanner to get m parents a copy of it for emergencies – have always hated last minute changes and requests- also the flight was scheduled for 15:45 and the airport said it’s 14:45 for daylight saving cancellation thing.

Arriving at the airport – without my passport and I dunno about it yet – and trying to pass the filtering queue and the police officer asked me about my passport and air tickets. I got the air tickets out and remembered that I forgot about my passport own the scanner, called my dad and waited for extra 35 mins till he got back to me with my passport, then I passed to check-in the flight and have the boarding pass. That went really smooth and easy, next stop Passport Control.

Arriving at the passport control, my friend gets done very quickly and the woman police officer asks me for my military permission to leave the country for a while, and I had it with me, so she commented

She: ” 3ayex Tehrab w teseeb el balad, 3ayez tetfash”
Me: ” la2 aho el tasree7 khodeeh”
Me: “2ahraba Leah Ana aslan khadamt khakas “

Then she took the permission and stamped my passport and boarding pass.

Then we went to the flight gate and we found the complete fun there, the calling system of the airport is saying ” last call for flight number 853 leaving to Frankfurt, please be directed to the gates immediately”, well here’s the thing, I’m at the gate and it’s not yet opened nor the staff is here xD, so. It’s something wrong happening, we asked and they said that the gates are going to open on 3:45 on the original flight time not the airport’s time.

we took the flight and it was a painful 4:20 hours flight, trust me when I tell you that it hurts to be sitting in the economy class for that long :s. However wt was worse is having 4 kids around you on a continous nagging and kicking ur seat or messing around you with juice and tea, well that’s nasty.

I’m trying to be optimistic and I an, cause after this flight we arrived at Frankfurt airport and. It is a great airport, we wLked for like 10 mins to reach the connection gate but it was a pleasant walk through the shops.

We went to the gates and made. Sure that the boarding passes we have are good to go, and they were. We then. Decided to eat the hägen dasz ice cream, and we did. It was a mouth watering experience.

We then took our next flight to Dublin Ireland and that was supposed to be a 1:20 hours flight and it took an extra hour, dunno the reason why. However the view of the cities we passed over at night was a pleasant view and good looking, they looked like colonies or tribes that Are in the desert, each bog city is glowing.

2:25 hours later we Arrived at Dublin airport exhausted and needy to sleep after this 8 hours trip, on arrival and at the passport control, well do u remember those kids from the Cairo-Frankfurt flight, seems out they were heading to Dublin too, and they are libyans and with their parents. They were the first people on the passport control, and it was like 30 mins investigation with them for the reason they should accept letting them enter the country , however they passed finally and we entered Dublin.

Ia got my phone ringing a number from Dublin landline and it was the taxi the hotel reserved for us on arrival, and said he’ll be waiting for us outside next to the information desk. We took our bags and went out to the information desk, we couldnt find him, so we waited for 10 mins then called the number back – I didn’t know it was a landline yet – and no answer was it. So we were called by the taxi company and we tried to make it clear that we are at the airport infront of the information desk they told us about. 10 mins later with no show up, I called the hotel to make sure they call the taxi company, 10 mins later e took a taxi from the street and went to the hotel. I called the hotel on my way and said we dnt want the taxi service anymore and we took a different taxi now, we are on our way.

Arriving at the hotel at night with this much of exhaustion, demanded a good sleep, and we did.

8:00AM in the morning I woke up and woke u my friend, took breakfast and decided to have a look around in Dublin and see what’s around, since we already know there’s a park near, we decided we to have a look at it.

The park is called “Herbert’s Park” and it is amazing at a first and last glance, it’s green as in real green, it’s big with a pond, birds, pigeons and ducks. Of course I had my camera on me, and took a couple of pix, suddenly I found a swan swimming in the pond, like a princess and that amazed me, I haven’t seen a swan for ages.

After spening an hour or so in the park, taking some amazing pictures there, we went for a walk to city center or downtown. Well that’s a new thing to know that Dublin has two city centers the first is by Grafton St. And Greens Park, the other is about O’Connels St.

We went to Grafton street and for our luck it was Bank Holiday so people were in the streets having so much fun, and off course they were drinking early in the morning.

It seemed like a live And nice place, we had a walk till the end of the street and I wasn’t impressed by the brands, but they had couple of good shops around. One designer house just shocked me. That was “CoCo Channel” it was there in a side street off grafton road.

After walking around for the day we decided we should have a tour around and see, having our iPads along we decided that connectivity is a must if we want to find our way around and make use of the technology in hand. We went to Meteor and got 2GB for 7days for only 8Euros – That’s Cheap- and we launched maps and watched where to go. We found out the biggest park ever in a city that’s Pheonix Park and it’s about 12KM from our hotel. Drilled down more and got a tram station and we took it to there.

We’ve been lucky that we walked a long the park, cause we’ve seen some wonderful scenes. And we noticed that people do run around the park from age 3 till 70+, they run, walk, wander around. They just keep their minds and blood running clean.

To Be Continued …….

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