An Irish Ending
Post date: 23-Aug-2009 13:39:19
Our week with the friendly people of Ireland really flew by. In between strolling through the parks, sipping Guinness in the storehouse, seeing a play, a bout of food poisoning for me and relishing the book of Kells we fell behind onour pictures and posts so here are the highlights:
Tuesday was our day of doing "nothing" as Colin likes to call it. In other words, we spent a day living in the country. I ran in Iveagh park while Colin caught up on his podcasts and reading. The park contains a rose garden and a hedge maze. Lots of locals go to the park for lunch or for a jog. Next, we went to a cafe and Colin caught on his computer work while I Read a book on the Sony ereader.
On Wednesday, we took the hop on and hop off bus for free to the Guinness Storehouse. You can smell when you're approaching the storehouse because the smell of hops and barley are fresh in the air as another keg is brewed. The Guinness Storehouse tour set us back 14 euros each, but we did spend 3 hours in the 7th floor building that is shaped like a giant pint of beer. The 7th floor is the "creamy finely knit head" as the video told us. It's also known as the Gravity bar. There is an art to pulling Guinness from a keg. The bartender pulls the glass about 3/4 full and then waits until the liquid turns from brown to black. He pours the rest and then instructs me "It's ready to drink when it turns black again." It was the second Guinness I've ever had and it was great, but I took longer to drink mine than Colin did.
Watching the beer turn from brown to black.
We also visited the archives room and looked at Arthur Guinness' family tree. He had 20 kids but only 10 of them survived to adulthood. Guinness has a huge photo contest and Colin is going to enter some of the pictures we took on our tour. He could win 1000 euros. Each year 2 million kegs of Guinness are shipped out of Ireland and 2 million stay in Ireland.
After the Guinness tour, we had lunch behind the Christ Church Cathedral. It was built in 1038 and I really wanted to go inside, but it was closed for filming the Tudors and then it was going to be closed for a wedding. Instead, we took the cope out tour of Dvblinia which was a bit of a rip off for our money. It was mostly a cardboard reconstructions of the Vikings with few actual artifacts. However, the exhibit was housed on the site of the medieval church St. Michael. The current building is a neo-gothic style and we enjoyed walking up to the tower.
We also saw these really neat sand sculptures inside the walls of the Dublin castle.
We spent the evening watching the Rivals at the famous Abbey Theater. It was a hilarious and romantic comedy with great language and in depth characters. We sat in the second row next to a couple from New York. The Abbey theater was started by W.B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory in 1899.
Unfortunately, we weren't hungry for supper before our show, so we went to eat afterwards. Most of the pubs stop serving food after ten, so we settled for Rick's burgers and I paid the price. I was up most of the night and I felt bad for the other 11 people in our hostel who had to listen to it coming out of both ends of me. I reassured people that I didn't have the Swine flu. Thursday was a right-off, so we weren't able to see the Blarney stone or the mountains.
On Friday, before we left town we went to our trusted Cafe Sofia for breakfast. The guy who owns the place is really friendly and they offer a huge breakfast for only 5 euro.
We also spent 10 euro each on a student led tour of Trinity College. Trinity Library which houses the book of Kells was built in 1752. The books are organized by shape and size (Irish logic). The library is magnificent and the manner in which the books are sorted does make them fit perfectly on the shelf. You can view half of the book of Kells (the book was divided into 4 parts) and one book is open to a picture page and one to a graphic page. I think the book has survived since 800 A.D. because the pages are made from the skin of calves (vellum, but not the vellum I know today for scrapbooking).
The last few days have all been summarized into one photo album of 245 pictures here.