Chapter 19, In which I have a Homer Simpson moment, we tour the Guinness Brewery, and our moods begin to lighten.

Another electric shower. In practice, I get the thing working right away. However, it had to take at least five minutes before I could get the water to a comfortable temperature. At my wits end, I mutter what I know is a Homer Simpson quote, when he said (in an extremely frustrated Homer tone of voice), "why...must...everything...be...so...hard." I've been racking my brain trying to remember which episode that was from; I have one Irish pound for the first person who can tell me. Nicole's frustration also shown through at this; I could hear her from the shower humming "The Star Spangled Banner." Amazing what showers can do to people.

We do the same Nicole-navigator routine to get ourselves down to the Duff, I mean, Guinness brewery. I have to say, Nicole's navigating is the only reason we ever found our way anywhere in Ireland. In fact, it's probably the only reason we found our way Out of Ireland...

Anyhow, the "brewery" tour is actually no more than walking through a museum. At first, the tour is self paced, walking through a giant collection of Guinness advertisements over the years. They are neat, but in a way very very sad, with slogans, "Guinness is good for you," "Guinness will cure xxx, xxx, and xxx diseases," and, "Guinness, for strength," and a picture of a man carrying a beam of steel. Other ads were based more around circus animals with a whole theme of "my goodness, my Guinness," and an animal running off with a person's pint. I'm sure this round of advertising helped a great deal in making Guinness what it is today, but I couldn't help but wonder what effect the "powerful magical potion" advertising campaign, while for years ignoring the dangerous side of alcohol, has done for the country. Don't get me wrong, I believe people make their own decisions and are not at the mercy of advertisers or Guinness beer or anybody. But, especially after touring this museum, I certainly can see where an argument can be made against such things.

The guided part of the tour was not of the actual brewery, to my disappointment, but of a rather silly museum. The narrator who led us through, however, was a wealth of interesting knowledge, including the fact that Arthur Guinness opened the Guinness factory for the rent of 45 pounds a year in the 1800's. Okay, that's not a bad price, but he signed a 9000 year lease! Talk about rent control (truth be told, the lease was recently renegotiated). So, although the tour itself was fairly silly, listening to the narrator was a lot like hearing a really good bedtime story.

Following, we went to the brewery pub to trade our ticket stubs for a free pint of beer. We had heard that it would be the best glass of Guinness we ever drank, and it was pretty good at that. We also had a wonderful cheese sandwich from the brewery coffee shop, and by the end of the visit, found that we had really enjoyed ourselves. And, for that matter, once again in a good mood.

Chapter 20, In which we ponder the price of Heaven, and then just get downright silly.

A short drive from the brewery took us to the St. Patrick's Cathedral. I nearly left my camera in the car, thinking it would be rude to snap pictures in what I thought would be a very quiet, solemn place such as an ancient cathedral. But, I kept the camera in my pocket, and am pretty glad I did so.

Instead of finding a solemn place, I immediately found somebody collecting 2 pounds per person to enter the church. Once inside, there was a nice, large gift shop set up and a whole bunch of school boys, in uniform, running around with crayons and drawing tools, lying on the floor coloring in the impressions from various locations of the church. Before long, the thought of being in a quiet, holy place was completely removed from my head, and I began snapping my own pictures of some of the amazing architecture.

Not to short change the place: the cathedral was absolutely beautiful. Apparently a good bit of the construction is still in tact from when it was built in the 12th century and was really stunning to see. There were many plaques set up explaining the historical significance of many of the structures. It would be the first real educated look we would have of the history of Ireland.

From there, we went to St. Stephen's Green, a very beautiful park a few blocks south of Temple Bar. We sat in the chilly yet comfortable park for quite some time before making our way over to the duck pond. Ducks like people who feed them. Ducks don't care much for people who don't feed them. Ducks, however, seem to really hate people who pretend to feed them. I couldn't understand where Nicole had gotten food to throw to the ducks, when I realized, she was just pretending to throw food to them so they would come over to us. The ducks bought it for a while, but then swam away really fast when they realized they were the butt of the joke. Occasionally one would turn around and give us a pretty mean stare, which I suppose we had coming.

But wait, it gets better. Those of you who know me probably already realize I can be a pretty awful person, and those of you reading this who don't know me are going to probably learn a lot about me in the next couple lines. But straight forward, my absolute weakness in this world is people falling. I will laugh and laugh until the end of the world if I see somebody take a tumble. And with that said, we were sitting on a bench by this already tainted duck pond when a young mom and her little boy were walking together. The mom accidentally clocked the boy's ankle with an empty stroller she was pushing, causing the boy to take a 9.8 tumble. And, sad to say, I just lost it. The poor little boy was crying and I was trying my hardest to hide my laughing from him and his mom, which of course only made me laugh more. Then I looked at Nicole, who saw me laughing and then started laughing herself, causing me to laugh so hard that tears were running down my face, causing her to laugh that much harder, then she said, "I didn't think it was funny, I'm just laughing at you," causing me to laugh that much harder. It was a good 15 minutes before I could breath regularly enough to start walking again, and of course I immediatly see another woman stumble and almost fall, but I am finally able to contain myself a little.

Ah. No wonder people hate Americans. To give Karma its due, it then took us almost one hour to drive two blocks in Dublin rush hour only so we could park and have dinner at Temple Bar.

Click on the photo to see some pictures of our past two days.

Chapter 21, In which we close out the evening and see a familiar face.

Walking out of the parking garage, we got a little turned around heading to Temple Bar, so we stopped in The Duke Pub in order to have a drink and get our directions straight. Yawn. Boring after work yuppie pub, complete with a set of non-smoking nazi's standing right by our table, complaining away and making toasts to smoke-free pubs. Something about sitting in a bar or pub hearing people complain about smoking just gets to me. What exactly do you think a pub is? Oh well, they left shortly, and we the Duke Pub not long after.

Probably not a bad time to tangent here: everybody in Ireland smokes. Okay, maybe not everybody, but just about everybody I saw over the course of the trip. There has been a pretty violent movement in America over the past 5 years to ban smoking just about everywhere except the outdoors, including all restaurants and bars. While I'm sure there are people in Ireland with the same ideals (our last B&B had approximately 8 "no smoking" signs in it alone), the progress there is not nearly as far. Many restaurants didn't even appear to have non-smoking sections, and it was pretty common to see people smoking at their tables at all points during the meal. As I ranted above, I'm pretty tolerable to smoking in bars, but I do think it is nice to be able to get away from smoke when I'm eating. Perhaps the most ironic thing about this entire situation is that cigarette companies in Ireland, apparently, are forced to give dreadful warnings with all their cigarettes and related advertising, such as, "smoking will shorten your life," or, "smoking causes fatal diseases." In a moment of personal weakness, I wondered if the level of smoking, combined with the government warnings, wasn't some sort of reflection on the quality of life in Ireland...

Onward. Mexico to Rome was the name of the restaurant we had dinner in. Nicole had a wonderful tasting Italian dish; it was probably the best tasting meal we had to date. My burritos left a little to be desired, leaving me to believe that the restaurant should stick a little closer to Rome and stay a little further away from Mexico. Okay, it was an obvious joke, but true nevertheless.

We went into the Temple Bar because they were advertising live music. The music never developed, before long the over crowded atmosphere was wearing a bit thin, so we headed back towards the parking garage. Along the way we heard a familiar sound, and realized there was a Khene player down the pedestrian sidewalk. As we drew even closer, we realized it was the Same Khene player we had seen in Galway a few nights earlier. The concept of the traveling street musician produced a number of romantic thoughts in my head, wondering if he just hitchhiked around Ireland playing in different cities night after night. I suppose it is probably less fun than it even sounds, but sometimes I think there are special people in the world who enjoy the journeyman, poor, yet happy performer entertaining people, if even only a few and for a short amount of time. Anyhow, giving him change for his playing made me feel good, and (selfishly) served a dual purpose of emptying a bunch of smaller coins from my pockets that I knew would never get spent.

Once again, we suffered through the housing development of our B&B until we found our destination, but by now the experience was not nearly as frustrating. I had come to accept the fact that, eventually, we would find our way, and it was no longer worth getting upset about.

Excitedly, we planned the next morning, as we were going to catch the train to Belfast.