The Queen’s walk on Mayday, London

/ Ralph Lavelle

At the end of a raw spring week sleet and windy, Sunday turned the corner into May, ready to make amends. That morning we stepped out of our Theseus Walk Airbnb pied-à-terre and caught the number 38 bus to Charing Cross Road, ready to take it on foot from there.

Leicester Square
Leicester Square

Maybe I’d been listening to too many Shane MacGowan songs, but I’d forgotten how pretty Leicester Square can be when it’s quiet and the weather’s good. Thick with tourists, touts, and down and outs as it usually is, it’s hard to appreciate its prettiness under normal circumstances, but on May Day we got to see the square with the Bard and the Little Tramp in a clean light, and it was nicer than I’d imagined it would be.

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Farewell to Clifden

/ Tina Lavelle

On a cold February evening in 1999 I met my future husband in a pub on Main Street, Clifden. By the end of the year I’d moved to that little market town on the Atlantic, where I spent the next four years before moving back to Australia.

As little towns in Ireland go, Clifden’s not bad.  Being a tourist town, there are pubs, boutiques and restaurants a-plenty.  It’s a vibrant place full of tourists,  and you’re always close to beautiful sandy beaches. But in winter it suffers the full force of the Atlantic weather and the tourists disappear along with a good portion on the locals. It’s just you and the mountains. And the lonely bogs.

Sky Road View
Sky Road View

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Ireland’s Heritage

/ Tina Lavelle

One of the best things we did when we first arrived in Ireland was purchase a one year family pass from Heritage Ireland.  For €60 we got a year’s worth of monuments, castles and manor houses.

We purchased it on our visit to Tintern Abbey and Colclough Walled Gardens last September down in Wexford.  Since then we’ve tried to visit as many Heritage Ireland sites as possible, though there are many more that we didn’t manage to get to.  Some of our favourites were:

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Tintern Abbey

A Cistercian abbey, founded c. 1200 by William, the Earl Marshall, and named after Tintern in Wales. It was occupied until the 1960s by the Colclough family.

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A little piece of Greece in Bloomsbury

/ Ralph Lavelle / 1 Comment

Our travels took us to London this past weekend, and to a part of town we weren’t at all familiar with: Angel. Sandwiched between the City Road and Regent’s Canal, our Airbnb place at Theseus Place took us along the calm waters of the canal with its colourfully inhabited barges each time we came and went to Angel tube station, even if the place itself lacked ‘street appeal’. To judge by the posters and books inside, though, the Frenchwoman who owned it was obviously a big Star Wars fan, so we felt the force was with us the whole weekend.

Eoin at the Parthenon Sculptures, British Museum
Eoin at the Parthenon Sculptures in The British Museum

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St. Patrick’s Day Parade 2016

/ Ralph Lavelle / 1 Comment

This year’s parade was our first St. Patrick’s Day Parade here in Dublin. Of course, having grown up here, I’ve been to my fair share of Dublin parades, but not for a long time. Not for twenty years or so.

Parnell Square
Looking up the east side of Parnell Square towards the Abbey Presbyterian Church. Well, I am. He’s looking down O’Connell Street. It’s that visual contrajuxtaposition that makes this picture work.

They throw a decent parade in Brisbane and we’ve been to a few of those over the years, though I fear that the Irish Club on Elizabeth St. won’t be there when we get back. So going to the parade here had long been on our agenda, and we weren’t going to miss it come rain or shine. Came shine, mercifully, and on the Thursday morning we drove into town and parked in a street of unsalubrious aspect between Mountjoy Square and North Circular Road.

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The road to the sunny south-east

/ Ralph Lavelle / 1 Comment

We’re on a mission to see more of Ireland, to go to the sorts of places, which, if we ever thought about at all when last we lived here over ten years ago, we would have dismissed as the sorts of places tourists went to. Places with castles and visitor centres, or interpretive centres, whatever they’re called. Back then the new Ireland we were interested in had sushi trains in the Purple Flag Area behind Grafton St., and the Pavilion redevelopment in Dun Laoghaire. It had roads bypassing old midlands towns like Loughrea and Moate so that all of us Celtic Tiger cubs could get from the M50 to Galway quicker (although the public jacks in Loughrea would surely be missed by those who used to ply that route). Even the ferry to Aran was a new catamaran made in Perth, Australia, with TVs and wifi, a step up from the odoriferous fishing boat Dad and I went out there on in 1982. This year I’m travelling with my own kids (and Tina, of course) as tourists, and we’re on a mission. So we end up going to places like the Ferns, in Co. Wexford.

Ferns Castle
Ferns Castle

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Mid-winter in Dublin

/ Tina Lavelle

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The holiday season is well and truly over and we’ve all settled back into our Dublin routines: the boys in school, myself in college and Ralph working in town.  We’re still on a bit of a high after our wonderful tour around Portugal and Spain over New Year’s.  If you’re not from Australia or New Zealand you’ll find it hard to appreciate our amazement and delight that when living in Europe you can fly, or drive, and be in another country IN A COUPLE OF HOURS!  Endlessly amazing.

Dublin has been having a pretty mild winter, though quite stormy.  December was one storm after another and constant, dreary rain.  January has been a bit colder, but with some fine days (or parts of days) and the storms not quite so regular.  The boys are still hoping for some snow but so far there’s been just a little smattering on the Dublin mountains which disappeared in a day or two.

Dublin, itself, hasn’t been too much of a culture change for us. We are halfway through our planned stay here and settled in fairly nicely.  Like in Brisbane, we’re living in a house in the suburbs so I thought I’d do a light hearted comparison between the two. Continue reading →

Feliz Nuevo Año, de Seville

/ Ralph Lavelle

With only a few hours until midnight on la Nochevieja, as New Year’s Eve is called in Spain, you’d think it would be easy to find a suitable restaurant in the packed alleyways around Seville Cathedral, but it wasn’t. Even when we found one with an available table, we were usually disappointed to discover once again that they were operating on a menú fin (set menu) basis at a cool €60 per person. Or else it was too bar-like. Or too smoky. Or loud. Or not Minecrafty enough for the kids, I don’t know. We pressed on. We tried down here, we tried down there. No luck.

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¡Olé!

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A Christmas trip to Brussels, part deux

/ Ralph Lavelle / 1 Comment

We went to Brussels for the weekend recently, but I only got as far as Saturday lunchtime in part 1.

The Atomium was the main pavilion of the Brussels World Fair of 1958 up on the Heysel plateau, a space-age icon that outlasted everything else. I’d been to it before, on one or other of my two previous visits to Brussels; I just hadn’t gone into it. Or had I? I couldn’t remember. You wouldn’t think you’d forget something like that, but that’s what happens as you get older and accumulate more and more experiences, and it’s shocking. I mean, how many crystals of iron had I seen enlarged 165 billion times, never mind actually been in? (As an aside, the word ‘atomium’ itself comes from ‘atom’ + ‘aluminium’, the metal they switched to mid-construction.)

Atomium2-s

C’est l’Atomium!

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