By the end of my time in Dublin, I was looking forward to going home. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the city, more that I was just indifferent to it. Even a nice sunset on my last evening didn’t win me over, and I flew home feeling done with Dublin.

I spent the weekend in Dublin after the meeting was over, but before we even reached Friday I began to feel a little bit bored. I felt like I’d seen all the main things in the city, and I should have gone to see what there was to see in the surrounding area. But I was lazy, and I ended up just killing time in the city. I always thought that anywhere outside London, and especially outside the UK, would be cheap. I began to realise this wasn’t always true when I decided to spend an afternoon relaxing in the sun in St. Stephen’s Green. I went to a shop to buy some bread and cheese and basic food, and it cost 11 euros. I decided that a city that was both a little bit boring and overpriced was not one I was particularly enamoured with.

Only a few months after my first trip to Dublin, I had cause to go back. It was the UK’s National Astronomy Meeting, inexplicably but very popularly being held outside the UK. I turned up half way through the week, and met a lot of people from my undergraduate days who I hadn’t seen for more than two years. On a sunny afternoon when none of us had anything else to do, a few of us revisited the Guinness factory. The views from the Gravity Bar were much better on this warm spring afternoon than they had been in the grim midwinter.