Lovely Day for a Guinness

November 14th (Third Month in Europe!)

Today our goal was to tour the Guinness factory.  We got up around 9:00 and after thawing out from the night before we asked Joe for directions on how to walk into the city.  It was a beautiful walk as the fall colors of the trees and the yellow leaves on the ground guided us along the one main road to the city.  We stopped to observe some of the monuments and old stone churches.  We ate breakfast at the "bagel factory" where we enjoyed having a kind of food that we hadn't seen in three months.  

We made it into the city but were pretty lost in regards to finding the factory.  It was a comical experience as we asked a lot of people for directions and were given responses in some Irish accents that were so thick that I couldn't understand a word that they were saying.  I would have preferred to speak with them in Spanish.  After some aimless wandering, we eventually came to "St. Jame's Gates" and the large Guinness Factory.

The girls had also gotten lost and we weren't reunited until 1:00pm.  We received a student discount and a map for our self guided tour.  My favorite part was the advertising section as I think the animal characters and advertisements are so clever.  Guinness used to be billed as an "energy drink," for "strength and vitality."  Did you know that they used to prescribe Guinness to pregnant women who weren't feeling well?!

The factory/museum was 7 stories and at the top we were greeted to a spectacular 360 degree view of Dublin and the surrounding countryside in the "Gravity Bar."  Here we turned in our ticket stubs for a complimentary pint of Guinness straight from the source.  We lounged in the chairs along the wall, "gulping" our Guinness and soaking it all in.

I continued my conversations with taxi drivers, this time about American politics, as we hailed a cab and took it back to the Temple Bar area.  We had an excellent early dinner at "St. George's," pub.  I was a little disoriented as the sun set and the night was pitch black at around 5 pm.  I guess we were a lot farther north than I realized.  

We decided to just hang out before going out later that night.  Blake and I went back with the girls to their hostel in the center of the city.  It was a really cool place with half of it an underground labyrinth with common areas.  We talked with some Spanish students from Valencia who were studying abroad in Germany and visiting Dublin for the weekend.

We ended up going out around the same area as the night before.  It was a lot of fun.  There were a ton of signs welcoming the "Kiwis" from New Zealand as there would be a huge Rugby game the next day between Ireland and New Zealand.  I had seen a  lot of "All Blacks" jerseys as we walked through the city.

Blake and I decided to save money on a cab and we walked back to UCD.  Along the way, we somehow ended up on the street with all of the embassies.  We stopped and talked to the night guard at the British embassy for a good 20 minutes.  Despite getting a little lost, we made it all the way back to Joe's apartment in a little less than then 2 hours.