Ah, a thread where I get to talk about myself. Yay!
Okay, so I got back from Dublin last Thursday. I was with friends, none of whom are big U2 fans, but I ended up seeing more U2-related stuff than I thought I would. (Sometimes completely by accident.)
One of my friends was the one who told me that Nude was owned by Norman Hewson (she got major points for that!) and we went in. It was before the lunchtime crowd, so there were no lines or anything. (We went past a couple of hours later and it was chock full of people.) They have really good stuff there. I had fresh apple and orange juice (and of course I was a dork and pried the Nude sticker off the bottle, and it's now among my other trip souvenirs.)
The same friend also alerted me to a bar on Grafton Street, Captain America's, where they had a bunch of U2 memorabilia on the walls. It was pretty cool -- I got a photo of one of the Popmart muscle shirts, framed and signed by all 4 guys.
Um, I went to a music store in Temple Bar that had 8 tons of U2 stuff. (Yes, exactly 8.) It was great. The entire back wall was covered in U2. (I bought a bootleg.)
Of course we also went to the Clarence. We didn't go to the Kitchen, but we did go to Octagon Bar. It was so cool! It's the type of place where, if Bono actually had been there or something, I would have felt *so* uncool actually going up to him for an autograph or something. Luckily (ha!) he wasn't there. We took some coasters, though. And a drink menu. (Again, we had to be sneaky, because we would have felt dreadfully unhip had we been seen.)
Our last day in Dublin, my friend and I took the train down to the southern suburbs. We got out at Dun Laoghaire, Killiney, and Bray. It's so funny. I honestly didn't even know that Bono lived in Killiney. It sounded vaguely familiar to me, but that was all. (Of course, when I saw the houses on the hills, I pretty much figured it out. Wow.) Anyway, I'd had no intention of hunting for Bono's house, because A) I was with my non-obsessed friend, and B) I sort of figured it would be hard to find anyway.
So my friend and I went out onto the beach and walked around a little bit. Soon a German Shepherd appeared out of nowhere, picked up a rock in her mouth, trotted over to me, and spit it out at my feet. I picked it up and threw it, and she tore after it. This dog wanted to play rock fetch! It was hilarious. I had never seen a dog fetch rocks before. So we played with the dog for awhile before leaving.
Later, when I got home, I looked on the internet and found a picture of Bono's house. I couldn't believe it! I saw that house from the beach (and Enya's house, too.) In fact, we'd been playing rock fetch basically in front of it! (Although the hills are pretty high). And, since I also found out Bono has German Shepherds, I'm going to pretend I played rock fetch with one of his dogs.
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"The minute anybody starts telling you what God thinks, or exactly why he does such and such, beware. People should never try to make God in man's image, and that's what they're constantly doing." - Madeleine L'Engle, 1963
"Some of my best friends are women. Some of my best friends dress up as women too." - Bono, Hot Press interview
"don't give up, you've got the music in you..."
