Sandymount photo shoot

Another birthday rolled around today. Met up with Carl for a celebratory meal in Tribes restaurant in Glasthule (all-night early-bird menu made it not too pricey). I did better than Carl did (only right, I guess, since I was the birthday boy). My starter of duck liver parfait was nicely presented and tasted okay, even allowing for too much jelly stuff on top. My main course of poached smoked haddock with a hot potato and broad bean salad with whole mustard dressing was delectable, but Carl's breast of lamb (!) didn't do anything to tickle his taste buds. Still, it was a pleasant birthday interlude.

We'd originally toyed with the idea of meeting in town, but changed our plan because we desperately needed to firm up some further details of our Grand Nordic Holiday (we fly to Oslo just three weeks from today). Most urgently, we needed to organise our Russian visas, which in turn meant we had to book accommodation in St Petersburg. Before getting down to that and before the meal in Tribes we first narrowed down accommodation possibilities for Oslo and sent off a couple of enquiries. With the meal out of the way we booked a hotel in St Petersburg, applied through them for the necessary visa support documents and submitted a preliminary visa application to the Russian embassy in Dublin. That took until after midnight.

I went via Sandymount as I crossed the city. I stopped with the intention of blipping the rare sight of Dún Laoghaire basking in sunlight with the cloud-darkened beach in the foreground and tried my best to get the rather strange looking sculptural thing in the foreground. I didn't have time to wait until this photographer finished his portrait shoot of a young couple (not visible in this shot, but peeping out in this one when the photographer caught me photographing him). Maybe next time I'll catch the weird sculptural thing with a sunlit Dún Laoghaire behind it. Maybe. I missed the moment this evening anyway.