This has been a mostly Olympics week.  We've been glued to our TVs watching and rooting for both team USA and Ireland.  I was sorry to have missed Gabby Douglas get her gold in gymnastics, but delighted with the win.  It was also fun to watch Michael Phelps make history.  We also enjoyed watching Usain Bolt, given our love for things Jamaican.  But, I have to say, I've had the greatest interest in boxing and eagerly watched Katie Taylor win gold against Russia. 

We're also looking forward to this evening's match with John Joe Nevin and the British contender, Luke Campbell.  It was pandemonium on the street yesterday when he won silver.  I knew that John Joe was from Mullingar, the 'big city' near my father's home of Moate, but just learned this morning that he's a 'traveler' -- better known as gypsy in other parts of the world.  Now that all makes sense.  There's a TV show here called "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding" and in addition to young women marrying very, very young in very, very over the top costume, the men are also pretty scrappy.  One of the rites of passage for a young man seems to be to get pretty badly beaten up.  The whole community seems to wholeheartedly support this. My father often spoke of the 'tinkers' -- the much more pejorative term; now I understand what he was talking about.

We didn't go to Moneygall last week after all.  Alan didn't want to make the two hour trip just for a house tour and pint in the pub.  I was disappointed, particularly when it turned out that the Democrats in Ireland had arranged a bus that we could have traveled on, but we didn't learn about that until too late. Instead we went to see "Riverdance" touring yet again in Ireland.  I'd never seen it live before and was surprised at how much I'd seen in snippets on TV.  It was quite energetic, I think Alan enjoyed it more than I did, but the theater in which it was performed, The Gaiety, while small for the amount of action on stage, was quite beautiful.  I'd like to see a play there in the future. 

On Tuesday we went to Glasnevin Cemetery, where almost all of the Irish patriots are buried.  That was quite a place.  The guided tour was quite interesting, including some information about a bombing there in 1970 in which the Ulstermen (the IRA's opposition) tried to blow up the memorial to James Connolly, Ireland's George Washington.  This was interesting because three years earlier -- during my time working for Aer Lingus in New York -- the IRA was successful in blowing up the Nelson's Pillar.  The Pillar was a memorial on the main street in Dublin dedicated to a British hero in the Battle of Trafalgar.  It stood for 160 years as "...the glory of a mistress and the transformation of our state into a discount office".  The IRA were much better with explosives than the Ulstermen because The Pillar is no more but Connolly's memorial survives. Like our Civil War, the War of Independence here lives on, although there is little current animosity toward the British -- except when our guy meets their guy in the ring at 8:45 tonight!

There is a titanium spire where Nelson's Pillar stood.  They call that the "stiletto in the ghetto".  Dubliners are very conscious about north and south of the river Liffey.  Even though it's a perfectly nice neighborhood, housing north of the Liffy, where this statue stands, is less posh than housing south, thus "the ghetto". There's a picture of the spire and Nelson's Pillar here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spire_of_Dublin

In the coming week we are preparing for our first visitors.  They will be here next Saturday and we are busy collecting information about things of interest in Dublin.  After three days here, we will travel with them to County Kerry to tour Killarney and Dingle.  We also learned this week that we will have our dearest friend with us for Thanksgiving.  All in all a good week.