"Discover Ireland!" Yes discover how bad it is! (Dublin in General)

Member Name: Pablo_Sevilla

Product:	Dublin in General
Date:	01/06/09 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: um...the Viking Museum?!

Disadvantages: Sights are incredibly lame! Extremely expensive...More than Scandanavian capitals.

So a few months ago me and my girlfriend managed to bag some 1p flights to Dublin with Ryanair.

Great we thought! You seem to hear so much about the place; amazing nightlife, Guiness...um. Did I mentioned the nightlife!?

So we did actually start to wonder what Dublin did have to offer other than Guiness and nightlife and did some research online.

We discovered it had a viking museum, a modern art museum, trinity college and the Guinness brewery. "Well..." we thought, "the adverts on television are always raving about Ireland" (discover Ireland), so we decided to give it a go.

Big mistake!

- Trinity college is just a normal university, not even that big. What is the big deal?
- The Guinness brewery is £15 so we naturally we didn't bother.
- Pretty much 80% of the Modern Art Museum's exhibitions were closed, we were told they had to borrow exhibitions from the Bank of Ireland...Come on guys, now this is just embarassing! It was absolutely awful.
- The price of food is obscene, especially with the current exchange rate from pound to Euro. We spent half the time walking around in the cold wind trying to find a place to eat. Mcdonalds costed £12 for a meal. Fish N Chips were £5. When we did find somewhere reasonably inexpensive to eat we had to sit outside in the cold. We ended up cooking our own food bought from Lidl at our hostel.
- Nightlife. What nightlife? Temple Bar area was touristy as hell, the pubs were just normal pubs, nothing special. And 4-5 quid for a pint of Guinness! Even in supermarkets alcohol was very expensive. So we couldn't even get drunk.
- Viking museum - This was embarassingly the highlight of Dublin for me. A fairly small museum with some fun Viking shields and helmets to play with!
- The Churches were average, even Christchurch and St.Patricks Church were just plain average; England has billions of better Cathedrals and churches and you usually don't have to pay extortionate prices to enter them (for example Salisbury cathedral in Wiltshire, totally free, huge and impressive for such a small town).

Sorry but I just don't know what people see in the place. Why on Earth do people feel that the sights are in anyway interesting? Most of the so called highlights you can find in any small city in the UK or anywhere on mainland Europe for that matter.

Dublin, and all of Ireland, lives off an image that is totally false. The tourist board has a good marketing body that makes Ireland seem appealling but when you get there you realise you've been misled!

Awful place.

Summary: Very bland and unaffordable city! Avoid.