7/9/10 - Dublin wrap-up

Day 23. Overall, I think Dublin did not live up to our expectations. Given our Irish ancestry and heritage, I think expectations were high and London and Edinburgh were going to be hard to top. Part of it was that Dublin is big and nothing really stood out. Or maybe it was that Irish pub marketing traditional live Irish and then playing Pink Floyd. The Game of Thrones tour was awesome but it was Northern Ireland so I’m not sure Dublin gets credit for that.

We fly to Seoul, Korea today. At first, I think the flight leaves at 3:15pm which means we can sleep in. Except I realize that I’m looking at the arrival time of our first flight to Frankfort and the departure time is 12:15pm. At least I figured it out then and not when we got to the airport and our flight had already left.

I’ve identified the self-service kiosk where you have to print the baggage tag for the checked bags as the one of the biggest bottlenecks for the group. While we all have backpacks, usually they are too big to take as a carry-on so we have to detach the small pack and check the big pack plus we have 3 common bags to check. So we have 7 people, 7 carry-on and 10 checked bags camped out in front a kiosk but we end up blocking three other kiosks. Three bags in and I get an error message. I go up to the counter to ask. She takes one look at us wrecking havoc on the kiosk area and tells us to get our bags and come up to the counter and she will check them all in. 5 minutes later we are done. That would have taken us an hour to do at the kiosk. Score one for Luftansa!

The rest of the way goes smoothly and we are off to Korea.