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Bus from Dublin Airport
And I thought the next 747 we would catch would be to Thailand. Where to start…..well knowing this was to be a flying visit we hit the ground running as soon as we landed and headed straight into the heart of the city. Upon arriving we actually headed in the wrong direction for about 800m (whilst dragging Anna’s noisy suitcase across some cobblestones), before getting our bearings and finding our hostel. We were pleasantly surprised by how huge our room was, dumped our bags and headed back into town for some food.
Having limited time meant limited choices, so we decided to visit the Guinness Factory which was on the other side of town. This place was huge, and to trying to imagine how it was back in the day at full swing is quite hard. The statistics were amazing with over 1000 wooden barrels having to be hand made every week or that the huge site has a 9000 year lease at only 55 pound per year. Bargain. It was a cool day to say the least, and Anna’s whingeing aside, it ended being an interesting journey even if only to watch Troy try to consume a pint of Guinness.
The overall feeling you get here is of history, everything seems
Dublin Sony Centre
BIt different to the one in Japan.... so old, and probably is. Our hotel even had some, with the original Guinness Brewer’s dad serving as a butler to the Priest back in the day. The post office has bullet holes in the columns and even our neighbours had a bullet hole in their door. It seems that bullet holes are the new black. The transport system here is hard to work out. They don’t have a route map displaying all the routes, but rather one for each and every route. Frustratingly we walked mostly.
The other thing we noticed was the beggars on the street. Over lunch we had observed their persistence, and sometimes intrusion. We observed the locals way of dealing with them, and took on their tactics. We did however observe one group who handed over their left over food, which overall might be the best thing to do.
We decided to have a quick rest back at our room before heading to the infamous bar district, Temple Bar. What a cool night we ended up having. The first bar was playing traditional live music which was enjoyable, though the price of drinks was a bit of a painful surprise. But the
Lighting World
Cool building to sell lights from. Jameson’s and cokes went down rather nicely…..maybe too nicely. We decided to head onto the next bar in search of some Craic. Well we found some great Craic just a block up the road.
The atmosphere at this bar was awesome and very different from the one before. It had many rooms all of which were packed with people from all walks and ages. We tried starting conversations with a few people….none of whom spoke English so decided instead to watch the musicians that were about to take the stage.
Zebra3 were a trio of lively energy. And even tho, the songs they played were not necessarily our usual choices…..they managed to have the entire pub (including us) singing and clapping and slapping their knees. They finally played their last song just after 1am (It was a Sunday evening I spose………) and we struck up conversation with two Irish local lads which continued until we were ushered outside.
Anna was definitely more tipsy then we had seen in a while………and Troy was feeling good and ready to party on when reality kicked in…….we realised everything else will soon be closing and we had to get up early
for breaky and to pack for our next adventure to Amsterdam.
The expensive drinks seemed to be weaker than usual, until we found out that the measured spirit shot was only 25ml, compared to our usual 30ml back in Australia. Double whiskeys fixed that problem, but at 5 euro a shot, and then another 3 euro for the coke, means a round of two drinks ends up costing 23 euro, or around Au$35.
We had a good night’s sleep, Troy realising how hard he had been hitting his thigh to the music by the fresh bruises; that was good craic.
Out to the airport on then onto Amsterdam.
We enjoyed Dublin so much we managed to blow our daily budget two fold in one day. Oh well we were up 60 pounds after finishing England, admittedly most was on the drinks out at Temple Bar @ Temple Bar, but geez that was good ‘craic’.
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