The dead zoo

This week saw us visit the Natural History Museum in Dublin, commonly known as 'The Dead Zoo'. When you enter, you can see why. It is an amazing place - the ground floor is full of animals native to Ireland and the top floor is for animals of the world (including kangaroos and a tasmanian tiger). When we arrived, James and I were saying that it looked like the museum hadn't been touched since the 50s or 60s - upon talking to a guard, we found out it hasn't been touched since it opened in 1857!! So it is actually a good example of a museum of a museum!

 

The guard also pointed out a few 'special' examples of taxidermy - including this Abyssinian hedgehog who is smiling!

We also found many squirrels, including the Irish Red Squirrel, although we are yet to see the real thing!

Walking around the centre of Dublin, we have also been shamrock spotting! You can find them built into fences, gates and lamp posts.

This is the back of the Irish Parliament, Leinster House, complete with a fence covered in shamrocks.

As I mentioned in my last post, we are staying in Dun Laoghaire and this is also where we have now found a permanent house to live in for the year. We move in on Friday so I will post some pictures once we get settled. We have spent some time this week exploring some of the surrounding suburbs - one is the quaint little village of Dalkey. Dalkey used to be an important port town for ships crossing the Irish Sea. Its main street even has 2 castles in it (there used to be 7 in the town) which date back to the 15th or 16th Century.

Relatives of the people whose house we are currently staying in kindly took us out for a drink in Dalkey and then drove as around the seaside suburbs here, which are sometimes called 'the Bay of Naples' and they did look beautiful at dusk with all the lights shining - mind you, dusk is about 4.30pm here!

We stopped out side Bono's house in Killiney so that I could get a photo of his impressive gates!

Another view of the 'Bay of Naples' seaside suburbs.

The rest of this week will be spent getting ready to move into our new house and getting the girls ready for school - they will be starting school on Monday - no long summer holiday for them this year! I'll fill you in on how that all goes in my next post.