The Dublin Community Blog

This is 2 day old news, but the achievement is worth a mention I think.  The Irish film Once has won the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.  The movie is written and directed by John Carney and stars Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová.  Its essentiallly a musical love story.  According to Michael Dwyer in the Irish Times the movie will be shown at next months Dublin Film Festival.  Its on general release in March.  Congrats to all involved in the making of Once.  I can’t wait to see it.

Glen and Markéta collaborated last year on an album called “The Swell Season” – one of my favourites from 2006.  Some of the songs appear in the movie and are well worth checking out on their myspace site.

On the 20th of this month, I took a knitting class from This is Knit in the Blackrock weekend market.  There were about 8 women learning to knit and two instructors but I was the only absolute beginner.  We went up to the “meeting room” which was the upstairs of a pub.  We were supposed to meet until 12:00 but none of us left until 1:45 PM!  We just got into the groove and lost track of time.

If you are a knitter looking for people to knit with, there are a lot of groups meeting around the Dublin area and the Stitch N Bitch yahoo group site has a calendar so you can look for group meetings near you.  There are regular meetings in Bray, Swords, Rathmines, and city centre.

Suffering from Big Brother withdrawal? Then get yourself along to Big Brother 8 auditions which take place in the RDS from 12 noon on Jan 31st.

RDS directions can be found on their website.

Audition information can be found on the Big Brother website.

Personally, I can’t understand why anyone would want their every move recorded 24×7. If anyone out there is auditioning or thinking about it, please feel free to post a comment.

Dublin Port Tunnel today opened its doors so to speak to all traffic. Up to now, it had been limited to HGV’s only, but from today, all vehicles are allowed to access. There is still no charge for HGV’s, however, cars etc will be tolled, with a toll fee ranging from EUR 3 – EUR 12 depending on the direction you are travelling and the time of day that it is. More details on the charges can be found here

Let us know if you’re planning on using the tunnel in your car via our poll over there >>>

The GAA has announced that the Dublin-Tyrone Allianz NFL game under lights at Croke Park is close to being an 82,000 sell out which will be a record for the League!

There are less than 1,500 terrace tickets left and all stand tickets have been distributed through the clubs.

So Dublin – Let the wonderful madness that is Dublin GAA commence. Also not to forget the Hurlers who are in action this weekend in the Walsh Cup.

Wohoo!

UPDATE: This game is now a sell-out!

Up the Dubs!

I said I would post more pics from O’Donoghue’s and here you go. This should be, and will from me, be an ongoing project for other great Dublin pubs. Maybe the other authors will show us their favourite pubs

The outstanding and hilarious author Bill Bryson will be in UCD this Thursday at 7:00pm to receive the James Joyce award from the Literary and Historical Society. As far as I can find out the event is open to the public and will be held in the Arts Block. Can anyone confirm this? It should be an interesting night as his books can be hilarious and Down Under seemed to be the standard reading material for most backpackers during my first couple of weeks in Australia.

Finding Celebrity (?!) Big Brother a bit of a yawn? Heres a few things that are happening over the weekend that might be of interest:

★ Tonight in Heineken Cup rugby, Leinster play Gloucester (away) in their final pool game. Kick off is 7.30pm and deferred TV coverage is on RTE 2 at 11pm. Live radio coverage can be found on RTE Radio 1 MW and Newstalk 106.

★ Willie Nelson plays the Point tonight and tomorrow night. Special guests include The Sharon Shannon Big Band, Eddi Reader and Damien Dempsey. Tickets are still available on Ticketmaster.

★ RockChic – The Life and Times of the Electric Guitar 1931 – 2006 exhibition at Collins Barracks ends this Sunday. The collection features guitars from Van Morrison, Phil Lynott, Jimi Hendrix etc. and a collection owned by the legendary Rory Gallagher. Well worth a visit.

★ At the Olympia Theatre, “I, Keano” continues its impressive run. Tickets are still available for this weekend.

★ If magic is your thing, tickets are still available to see Keith Barry in Vicar St tonight and tomorrow night. On Sunday night the wonderful Ben Folds plays there.

★ Golden Globe “Best Drama Film” Winner and Oscar hopeful Babel opens in cinemas this weekend.

Whatever you do, have a good one

If you are looking for a decent pub and pint of Guinness (I am reliably told – not being a Guinness person myself) in Dublin, look no further than O’Donoghue’s on Merrion Row.

It is a no-nonsense, full of atmosphere, good pints, great music decent pub. There’s none of the interior design nonsense of other places in O’Donoghue’s. Much as those designer outlet pubs can look great all I want to do in them is use them as a snazzy backdrop for portraits of people. I do not want to pay for this heavy design with each pint.

The bar inside is lined with aging photographs and newspaper articles, great bar staff and the decent pub stalwart, a special toastie ie ham, cheese, onion and tomato. They are cooked in that mad plastic stuff which used to amuse me no end when I first moved from Belfast I had never seen anything toasted like that before. And unlike other pubs, O’Donoghue’s remove the burnt brown plastic before serving.
The only downside is a Friday evening when all the workplaces nearby spill out and into every nook and cranny in the place leaving no space to stand let alone enjoy a drink.

I have found myself there a lot over the years and even more so since the smoking ban because they have a great covered alleyway with gas heaters and halogen lamps and you can have a ciggie with your pint. Hence why there isn’t one pic of the inside.

*I will remedy that in the next week and update the post with pics from the inside*

The pics were taken on a quiet Sunday afternoon, a lovely time to stop in for a coffee (which is actually yeuck though I still get it) and watch the world go by.

Yesterday, after a shopping misadventure, we decided to try a Chinese place that we had walked past on other occassions and looked nice.  While looking at the menu outside, we wondered out loud if the food was nice since the menu certainly looked good.  A guy also looking at the menu said that it was “deadly.”  So, we went in, as did they.

The Good World has a nice interior with large tables.  The menu is fairly large and has many of the standard Chinese dishes.  Since a lot of Chinese food has MSG, I thought that I would take a chance and ask a waiter.  I flagged one down (which was quite easy) and asked him if the food had MSG.  After clearing up the miscommunication about what I said (he didn’t understand me), he said that some dishes have MSG and others don’t.  The king prawn cashew that I wanted could be made without MSG.  We were interested in a starter but the waiter was able to tell us that they had a trace amount of MSG since many of them are prepared elsewhere or ahead of time.  After ordering, the waiter came back to tell us the the dish my boyfriend had ordered had a trace amount of MSG in it!  He actually went to the kitchen to check.

So, the food arrived quite quickly and was excellent.  The portions were good sized (but not huge), which was nice to see since the prices were about 12-18 per main (entree).  As per usual here, you have to pay extra for a serving of rice but we were able to share one between the two of us, mostly because I don’t eat very much rice.  We had a pineapple fritter for dessert, which was also tasty.

The service was also excellent.  The waitstaff was friendly and attentive. They filled our water glasses without us having to ask and observed when we were finished with our food.  They allowed us time to relax/let our food digest before asking if we wanted tea/coffee/dessert.

So, we have finally discovered a good Chinese place in Dublin!  I am quite happy about this, since we miss Chinese. Oh, for those interested, Good World is on George’s Street over by Dunnes store.