Major Knuckles and the Tambourine Walk

In Dublin, there are fifty different monuments to James Joyce and this one, a 3rd floor mural in Isaac's Hostel (76% Approval Rating on Hostelworld.com), dedicated to gilded lions that hang out by sewage pipes.  The hostel also boasted communal showers that operated for half-minutes at a time, spraying ice water, an equally frigid room with bunkbeds(!) and little else furniture-wise, comforters made of velcro, a somewhat demented desk clerk who tore a map clear in-half while attempting to direct hostelers, an adjacent roomful of giggling French girls that may have been twins but regardless of zygote-sharing exploded into laugh apoplexy every night at around 4 A.M.  The Wi-Fi was more than passable.  Carmen's grade: 70% (3.5 strawberries).

Prior to getting mugged, Carmen and TCS's wanderlust led them into this scenic Irish ghetto.  Childhood flights of imaginative fancy, especially those involving garbage, are truly inspiring to see, and Carmen couldn't help reminiscing about boyhood afternoons spent mummifying himself in used toilet paper, forging wigs out of tampon strings, and basically rolling around in big piles of refuse until the sun sank into the horizon and his mother rang the dinner bell.

St. Stephen's Green is now up there on Carmen's All-Time Park's List, somewhere between Central Park and Bay Lea.  The rolling, verdant concourse was super green even out of season, and the bundled children roamed, and swans eased down the mini-lake, and everything was near bloom.

OH LOOK AT THE DUCKS!

Just around the corner from Isaac's Hostel were 1. O'Shea's Pub and Restaurant and 2. This Horrifying Doll Thing.  O'Shea's was Carmen and CTS's main haunt for the trip, providing one of the better bar experiences in Carmen's pretty short positive bar experiences list.  There was fiddling and mandolining and bar-wide clapping and chorusing and the overall mood clocked in at cheery.