St. Patrick's Day on the Emerald Isle

One of the beautiful things about living in Europe is being able to travel in Europe! So, on Saturday my friends Cait, Erin and I left to celebrate the greenest of holidays in the greenest of places, leaving many of our friends green with envy (we were just helping out those attempting to celebrate the holiday, you see).

We arrived at our hotel at about 10pm on Saturday evening and promptly went down the road to have a pint and celebrate being in Ireland. We loved the pub - it played awesome music, was homey and comfortable... and apparently was the regular for a very creepy old man who appeared to be there with two hired call girls - there is just no way they were there together. We attempted to take a couple pictures of the hilarious scene but were fairly unsuccessful. We saw the creepy guy again the next night on our way home from the pub, though this time sans questionable company.

Sunday morning we set off to explore Dublin. We basically walked around without a map for awhile but managed to stumble across some fun stuff. We walked into Merrion Square which is one of the four Georgian era squares in Dublin. This one is about half over-grown garden and half manicured lawn, with some random public art and statues (including one of Oscar Wilde). Around this area they were also setting up a fair and the parade for St Patty's Day. We wandered down to St. Stephen's Green ("the Green") which strongly reminds me of Boston Public Gardens - some man-made water features and manicured lawns, etc. I can see if I were a Dubliner having picnics and hanging out there on sunny days. Then we decided as we had not managed to procure a map (a persistent problem), we would take a bus tour to get the lay of the land a bit. Our main stop from the bus tour was Kilmainham Gaol (Jail), where many of the republican rebels were held in the 19teens and 1920's. I'll go ahead and admit that my Irish history is woefully poor but we really enjoyed it. That evening we went out in Temple Bar, had a few drinks, met some strange people and called it a night.

Happy St. Patty's Day! Well, in case you didn't guess, Dublin fills up for Ireland's big holiday. It was later reported that 670,000 people showed up to enjoy the festivities. We weren't all that keen on seeing the parade, so we pushed through the hordes and hordes of people to see where the magic happens - The Guiness Storehouse. Mmm mmm good. We learned a lot about beer making, had a mid-morning free half pint, and then another free pint (gotta love 'em). What I learned from the Guiness factory:

The word beer is thought to originate from the Anglo-Saxon word "baere" which means barley.
... and some other stuff. I just wrote that one down.

To stay in the spirit of St. Patrick, we followed Guiness up with a tour of the Jameson distillery. While I'm not a huge whisky drinker, I like Jameson and ginger so after the tour I got a free one. Awesome! Love the free drinks that come with the tours... the discount with the student rate basically means I'm basically paying less than I would for a drink in a bar for the tour+drink. Wicked.

We went out for dinner in Temple Bar to a "boxty" restaurant which is allegedly a traditional Irish dish centered around - no way - potatoes. It was quite yummy, I had lamb on mine and Erin had chicken. Then we went out in Temple Bar and ran into some Aussies. Up until that point, I wasn't really drinking...However, I was giving one guy (named Cieran) a hard time for drinking like a girl, and he challenged me to down the rest of his pint (which was about half full, and about 90% whisky). Well, I never turn down a challenge, and I finished it off no problem. The look on these guys' faces was absolutely priceless - who would have thought a girl could drink like that ;) I'm not entirely sure it's something to be that proud of. But the night was a success.

By the next morning we luckily woke up hangover free, but we were exhausted. We had done a ton of walking over the last couple of days. We also wanted to get out of Dublin a bit to see some "real Ireland". So we hopped on a bus tour that took us into County Wicklow which has beautiful "mountains" and some ancient settlements. Our first stop was Glendalough, which is an ancient Monastic City and the home to St. Kevin. It sat overlooking two beautiful lakes so we had about an hour to walk around and explore. Our second stop was Avoca, which was a small town near the coast, an hour south of Dublin. We had lunch and walked around a bit. I'm not going to lie, Erin, Cait and I slept almost every minute we were on that bus. So unfortunately i missed some of the scenery driving by, but I think I got the jist of it. I also found out that "rugby" in Gaelic is "rugbai" ... in case you cared. We went to bed about about 9 that evening. I cannot remember being so physically exhausted in recent memory.

Wednesday, our last day, we packed in everything we had failed to do up until that point. We started out in St. Patrick's Cathedral, followed by Christ Church. I've seen a lot of churches in my day, but they always seem important to visit. Also, having spent the morning watching the Tudors, I was pleased to know I had just been in the church where they filmed some of it (the church scenes are filmed in Christ Church)... mmmm... Jonathan Rhys Meyers. We also went to the Irish Museum of Modern Art. I'm not big into Modern Art but it was free, so we took a turn around it. They had some interesting exhibits. Lastly, we finally wound up at Trinity College to see the Book of Kells. What I liked even MORE was the giant library full of old first edition books. I was just disappointed I didn't get to flick through them!

We had a long, lazy lunch and wandered around a bit more before returning to London town at about midnight. After a mad dash and unsuccessful attempt at getting the last tube, we took the bus home, absolutely exhausted. It was a really fun long weekend. I don't think I would return to Dublin but I am definitely interested in seeing more of Ireland some day.