These days bus riders have plenty to talk about, and most of what they're saying revolves around Dublin itself. That's because Europe's backwater city has become its stylish front-runner. In Dublin, though, regardless of how fast things change, you can still count on a pint of Guinness and one more tale with your scampi risotto or sashimi. The Liffey River divides the city into two unequal halves. Rain sprinkles the city throughout the year, though the clouds can clear in a fickle Irish second.
Temperatures stay relatively mild, even in the winter.
She was immortalized in 1989, on Grafton Street. If it's raining, duck into a purely Irish museum or two. When the sun breaks, take a carriage ride around leafy St. Stephen's Green , past the shimmering emerald lawns that underscore the luck of the Irish. Bordering Trinity College and home to the city's most elegant restaurants and hotels, the district's upper-crust air isn't too crusty. While the rows of Georgian town houses wear faces of austere red brick, their arched doorways are painted plum, lemon yellow, scarlet, spring green, and aqua, like an irrepressible splash of high spirits.