Cork City Center

Greetings from Cork City! It is the second largest city in Ireland and we were lucky enough to spend a lot of time there. It is a nice city to visit. The River Lee runs through the city kind of dividing it in half. We found it easy to navigate with a lot of streets to explore. All the lights and Christmas decorations were still up giving it a very festive feel. 

In front of the massive Dunne's grocery/department store. I was pretty excited to see these Dunne stores around because my maiden name is Dunn. It is without the e but I did some research and found out that Dunne is another spelling of my maiden name. This solidifies that I have Irish ancestory. Interesting side note: My mother-in-law's maiden name is Sainsbury, and in England there is a national grocery store chain called Sainsburys. So we have the whole United Kingdom covered with grocery stores named after our ancestors. 

Strolling down Plunkett Street named after Oliver Plunkett.

 

Those festive lights. It was something magical once the sun started to set.

 

 Here we are at The Oliver Plunkett pub. It is famous for having live music every night. We visited a couple of times. It is a really fun place to hang out. To the left is a picture going up the stairs. It was a lot of fun. Cork is the music capitol of Ireland and hosts many artistic festivals so it is only natural to stumble upon a place like The Oliver Plunkett.

There was a Ferris Wheel in town we took the kiddos on. We got to see fantastic views of the city too!

Brooke, William, George, Me, and Henry (in the carrier) enjoying our Ferris wheel ride.

Lyndon, Cosette, and Gregory sat on the other side. Cosette really enjoyed playing with her cousins. 

Views of Cork from the Ferris Wheel.

We had to get another picture with St. Fin Barre's Cathedral and the quay.

We should have devoted a whole post to Butler's Chocolate Cafe. We went there a lot. Butler's is a chain in Ireland. We hope it moves to the US. I heard there is one in Park City. I hope that is true. We are lovers of hot chocolate. When we venture out we like to get some. It started in England. On our way back from Greece we had to spend the night in St. Pancras train station in London. There was a Starbucks that was open 24 hours we hung out at. Our course to pass the time we got some hot chocolate. Ever since then hot chocolate has been our thing, which means we got a lot of hot chocolate from there. They have plenty of different varieties so it never got old. Lyndon stuck with his classic dark chocolate hot chocolate. I tired a lot of different flavors: cookie hot chocolate, marshmallow hot chocolate, gingerbread, regular, and winter spice which was my favorite. Oh Butler's so many delicious memories. We thank you for that. 

In Ireland it is always a lovely day for a Guiness. We passed by this sign on a pub. Lyndon is standing in front of Trinity Presbyterian Church.

The colored front door is an Irish thing. There different colored doors all over the country. I saw several calendars, post cards, magnets all about the colored doors of Dublin/Ireland. My favorite one we saw was a magenta pinky color. I really want to paint our front door a color like that, or yellow. 

We walked up to St. Anne's Church to ring the bells, but it was closed. Another thing to add to our to do list in the Spring.

That is not all we did there either. There is another post or few posts about what we did in Cork City Center.