guiness is good for you

I am back from Ireland and it was fantastic. On Friday Jessie and I went ot the Dublin writer's museum, which was really interesting, to us anyway. There are so many writers from Dublin, but you don't really realize it until you see them all in one museum like that. And it seems like Dublin as a city is really proud of it's writers; they have monuments and quotes all over the place, which Jessie and I greatly appreciated. We went and looked at the outside of the Abbey Theater, where a lot of great plays were put on and protested and whatnot. The theater itself was not very memorable or exciting, which made me like it even more. We wandered around in Trinity college and wished we were students there, and saw a really cool monument to Oscar Wilde which was in a really cool park that was more like a forrest, with lots of chirping birds. Then we got kicked out of the park by a man with a bell and proceeded to try and go to a Yeats exhibit, which was also closed for the day. So we finally went back to our hostel and met our three roommates: two weird german guys, and an irish guy who is living there in the hostel "until he gets his own place". His name was Patrick and he was just great. The only bad thing about Patrick was that he slept like 20 hours a day, meaning we had to be quiet all the time and couldn't hang out in our room ever. Other than that jessie and I both had a huge crush on him and desperately sought his approval. Anyway, we were supposed to go gout Friday night, but Denver's flight was delayed and he didn't arrive until 2 AM, so we didn't.

On Saturday we went on a tour of the Guiness brewery, which I thought was kind of lame because of course we didn't actually get to see any of the real factory, and it was mroe like a museum. Denver, however, is obsessed with all things guiness, and loved it. The best part was that the museum is shaped like a giant pint glass, and you work your way up to the top, where there is a bar, where you get a free pint. So we got to drink our pint with a 360 degree view of the city, and, not surprisingly, there were quotes on each windowpane about different places in Dublin from Ulysses, corresponding to what you could see out of that particular window. Also, a stranger gave us her pint because she didn't want it. I think Guiness is disgusting, so it was hard enough to finish my own, but Jessie and Denver polished it off no problem.

Next we went to the Jameson distillery tour, which was similarly kind of lame except for the part at the end where we drank alcohol. Jessie and I were chosen to be taste testers, and were given 5 small shots each--3 irish whiskeys, 1 scotch, and one american (JD). After we compared them all and chose our favorite (Jameson, of course!) we were rewarded with another glass. We left the distillery in a very good mood, and wandered around looking at pretty buildings for a while before dinner at a pub, which was great and cheap and filling. Hooray for the euro.

Saturday night we went clubbing at Temple Bar, which is the nightlife hotspot in Dublin. It's actually not just one bar but a whole neighborhood of them. The places we went to pretty much sucked though, so that was lame. We (Jessie and I, anyway)were hoping to meet some attractive Irish guys with accents, but I have never seen so many creepers in one club. The only guys we met were so Englsih you could have spotted them from a mile away--pointy nosed, uptight, slightly gay for each other, faux hawked, simultaneoiusly skinny and pudgy. Basically they were exactly the type of English guys that make you want to meet some Irish guys. Fine for London, incredibly disappointing in Dublin.

Sunday we went to a place called Howth, which rhymes with both, on the train. We got lost on the way there and spent an hour in the middle of suburbia, but when we finally got there it turned out to be one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. It's a little fishing town with boats, seals, a lighthouse, and all kinds of other picturesque things. We ate lunch at a market and walked along the jetty to the lighthouse, and sat in the sun. It was really, really nice. Finally we took the train back to Dublin, had some more delicious pub food, and called it a night because we had to leave for the airport at 4 the next morning.

I don't know if that was interesting to read or not, but I usually feel that I should go into more detail about my travels so this was my attempt to fix that. I still have no keyboard but hopefully it will get here soon. Pictures soon, maybe. kthanksbye.