"Dirty old town" a Dublin Travel Page by Tschuli

Hectic, overpriced, crowded, dirty, provincial, sprawling, ugly, fake... these are just some adjectives people use for describing Dublin. For some reason very few tourists seem to actually like the big smoke. And I'm not necessarily saying these attributes don't apply, but they are far from the whole picture.
What really irks me is when people say that Dublin is not the real Ireland. As if their quaint ideas of tourist idyll were closer to the true Ireland than the capital city where very real Irish people have been living very real lives for centuries.
Dublin can be all the above, but it can also be relaxed, calm, cosy, modern, vibrant, beautiful and down to earth.
You just have to look!