Day trip to Malahide (18.10.)

After neglecting the chronological order of the events for the first time yesterday, in favour of the immediate release of the post about our adventurous hike, I'm going back to normal now. I had already created a draft for this post before I switched to English, but luckily I hadn't really written anything but the title so far. For the people with knowledge of the German language, the original headline of this post was "Wo waren wir denn noch nicht...? Ach ja, Malahide!", indicating that after Skerries (twice) and Howth, it had been time to visit Malahide. To illustrate what I'm talking about, have a look at the inevitable map:

Source: Google Maps, as always...

The distance between the mentioned towns / villages / definitely not cities is not too big, and Malahide is located just between Skerries and Howth.
In order to go there, you just do the same you would do to go to Skerries or Howth: first go to Dublin Connolly, then take the train to your destination of the day. Sounds pretty easy, which is true - in theory. De facto, it's still not difficult, but is linked to lots of waiting. I could start complaining about public transport at this point, but yeah, everybody has understood that by now, I guess. So I'll just skip the grumbling part this time.
After everybody had arrived at Connolly, had gotten everything they wanted (coffee, mobile phone credit, tickets to Malahide, don't know what else...), we could finally take the next train to Malahide. And we didn't even have to break the rules of the train station (no running, wtf?) to make it.

Annotation: even if you're able to spot my reflection - this is not a selfie!

Yeah, and now I just checked out all of the pictures I took on that day. Believe me, that was hard work, since during the Malahide trip, it happened for the first (and so far only) time, that my camera capitulated: its battery was empty. Naturally, I didn't take that as a sign that I could have taken enough pictures for that day - no, I just continued with my phone! (To be honest, I had promised to take lots of pictures, so I couldn't just stop after only half of the trip. That wouldn't have been an appropriate kind of documentation!)

So, what's there to be seen in Malahide?
The answer to that question is pretty easy: there's a castle, and that's basically it. So, when we arrived in Malahide, we agreed on going to the castle first. By the way, this is Malahide's train station. I thought it was nice, so it deserved to appear in this post. ;-)

Going to the castle was supposed to be a relatively easy task, since it is the (only) attraction of the town. According to that, there were signs leading to it. Buuut (big but, ahem) they weren't exactly ideally positioned - there were at least two signs that were contradictory: they showed different directions!
However, although whoever had placed these signs hadn't wanted us to find the castle, we managed to do so. Well, first we found this:

Nope, this is not the castle. If it had been the castle, we would have been finished within a few minutes. :-D To gain access to the castle, you had to go into the visitor centre, try to get not too distracted by lots of souvenirs (we were sort of successful), and buy a ticket for the castle. Some of us got a ticket, the others got left behind here:

Not the worst place. ;-)

Inside the castle, we attended a tour. You get to chose between listening to a human guide talking English and an audio guide talking Spanish. Nobody was able to fully understand why there was only Spanish, but yeah, since we all understand English: who cares...
The tour guide started with telling us about the five (or so) ghosts living in the castle. Of course, we didn't see / hear / notice in any way any of them, but it seems like Irish people are really into ghosts. Not sure, if they are serious about it or if it's some sort of marketing strategy. Maybe both:

On the back of the toilet door.

Then, the guide showed us around the castle. I'll just insert a few (more) of the pictures I've taken.

Nice chairs, but no sitting on them, please!

Pretty lighting!

Margaret Thatcher has sit on the left one, if I remember correctly.

Cool moulding (or whatever you call that).

Next room: I still like the lighting :-D

Our guide explaining how to not lose your face (make-up) near the fireplace.

Upstairs: having tea next to the bed - nice. :-D

I like fireplaces.

Slightly kitsch, but I'd still love to sleep in a bed like this!

The lighting thing again...

The fireplace thing again. :-P

Looots of paintings. The big one (The Battle of the Boyne) is being restored atm...

And another fireplace to end with.

Of course, we weren't finished after the castle tour. When you're already there, you have to make the most of it. We had bought a combi ticket which gave us access not only to the castle, but also to the gardens. It was just in the gardens when my camera gave up. The following pictures might serve as an explanation why. (I'm not going to upload all the pics I've taken, no worries! xD)

I think, someone compared that to entering Narnia.

A very old tree.

This is probably the perfect climbing tree.

After our excursion to the gardens we had to get moving to meet the others again. The instructions where to go were pretty clear: go to the port. There was only one problem: so, where is the port? :-D
But we eventually managed to go there, I have proof of that:

The others had been sitting around (+ eating) enough, so we decided to check out the church nearby.

A blue door, seriously? xD

Interestingly shaped ... "trees"?

And this is - surprise, surprise! - holy water! Still no selfie. :-P

After that, we were done in Malahide, so we went back to Dublin. Some of us ended up in a pub, which is kind of normal for Ireland. I ordered tea again, which is kind of normal for me. I'm not going to try and describe the facial expression of the guy at the bar, who obviously didn't consider that normal. Instead I'll just finish this post with a nice picture (regarding the content, not the quality) of the Liffey at night. :-)