Céad míle fáilte!

100,000 Welcomes to Dublin! Fiona and I went to Dublin for the weekend of November 4th. It's taken me a while to post about it because I've been traveling a lot since then (more on that later). 


I took a morning flight (which Lorrie happened to be on) and got to Dublin before 10am. I was really early to meet my friend Abby so I wandered around and saw the Whitefriars Street Carmelite Church (where St. Valentine is buried) and the Shaw birthplace:

I met Abby around noon at the Chestur Beatty Library. The library is a museum built around Beatty's private collection of rare books, especially Asian ones. The library is right behind the Dublin Castle (which I went to later). I was practically falling asleep because of my early flight, but it was really amazing to see such early books from all over the world. Here are the castle gardens and the stagecoach house by the museum:

I went to check in to the hostel after the museum and it went pretty smoothly at first. I took a nap because I didn't have anything to do until Fiona arrived in Dublin, but I was woken up by a Spanish man telling me I was in his bed. The hostel had just given me the wrong bed number and it was easily fixed but it was not the best experience. Fiona got to Dublin easily, but then tried to take the tram (LUAS) to our hostel in Smithfield. First, the tram stopped and no one was allowed off. Then they were all forced off because of a fire on the tram tracks. Finally, she met me at the hostel and then we went to dinner. 

The next morning, we started off by wandering towards Temple Bar. The Bar part originally meant walkway, which is common throughout the British isles. There was an open air market and lots of clothing shops:

We got brunch at Elephant and Castle in Temple Bar, which is the name of a lot of restaurants in the UK and this one has a partner restaurant in Greenwich Village. After Temple Bar, we walked by St. Patrick's Cathedral. We didn't go inside any of the churches, but St. Patrick's green was beautiful in the sun.

Then we went to the Guinness Brewery! 

The tour is a separate building from the brewery. The different levels of the building take you through the entire process of making Guinness. They especially emphasize how they get the ruby color of the beer. They also had exhibits on employees and advertising campaigns. I did a search for McBride in past employees and only one name came up. 

At the top, there's the Gravity Bar. Everyone (over 18) who goes through gets a pint of Guinness:

A lot of stuff around the city was green, including the lighting under the bridges in the middle of the city:

 The next morning, I went to O'Connell Street, the historical center of Dublin. I walked by the Post Office that still has bullets in the walls from the Easter uprisings. In Remembrance Park, there was a memorial for the Children of Lir:

Afterwards, I went to the Dublin Writer's Museum, which is really underwhelming. It was interesting to hear about how James Joyce's Ulysses walked down O'Connell Street.

My last stop in Dublin was the Castle, which is really a Georgian palace. I got there just in time for a tour through the State apartments. There isn't much to see, but we saw the room where Queen Elizabeth had a formal ceremony for her visit earlier this year and where presidential inaugurations take place. I was actually visiting a few days before the newest presidential inauguration on November 11th. 

Overall, I had a great time in Dublin. It reminded me a lot of Boston and was full of the friendliest people I've ever met. The one thing I would like to do more of in Ireland is see the countryside, which seems beautiful.