Dublin Adventures - Day 2

After sleeping in, we awoke and headed directly into the town center to Grafton Street after passing along St. Stephen Green which was directly in front of our hotel. St. Stephen's Green is a bit like Central Park, but on a much smaller scale.

St. Stephen Green


Grafton Street is a pedestrian mall with lots of shops, pubs, and people. It was surprising to see all sorts of musicians playing in the area. Matthew promptly found the best hot chocolate in Ireland for breakfast and we headed to Ireland’s oldest college – Trinity College – to see the famous Book of Kells. The Book of Kells is a Latin translation of the Four Gospels from the Dark Ages. It seems that scribes took care of the writing and separate artists ornately decorated the pages. It was beautiful. Also, we saw the Long Room which houses over 200,000 books. It was pretty magnificent.

Grafton Street




Trinity College



We still hadn’t seen a drop of rain (totally uncharacteristic of Ireland!) so we stayed on foot and headed to the Tourism Centre to check out any tours we may want to do. We had heard about a “literary” pub crawl which takes you through pubs famous writers used to frequent (e.g., James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift) and the tour guides perform from different writers’ works. We asked the lady at the tourism center about this tour and she encouraged us to go and said it would be no problem to purchase tickets when we got to the meeting location.

After leaving the Tourism Centre we struggled to find our Hop On bus again so we stepped into a pub, had yet another type of beer. We started to notice a trend at this pub – Budweiser is King here. People love Budweiser and Coors Light – traditional American beers. Oh look – there’s the bus!

We found the bus!




We hopped on and headed to Kilmainham Gaol which used to be an active prison that housed some of the most famous of Ireland’s rebels who fought for freedom against the British rule. The jail was interesting and the tour guide was excellent weaving stories of these men, women and children who were housed there. During the early 20th century when there was a famine many children were jailed for stealing loaves of bread. Capital punishment was in full force here and carried out swiftly. I always love visiting Alcatraz for some reason when going to San Fran, but I got the same feeling after the end of this tour that I get at the end of that one...time for something more uplifting!

Kilmainham Gaol





So off we went (via cab because we didn’t know when the Hop On bus was coming again…it can’t be this hard to figure out!). Our next tour was the Old Jameson Whiskey Distillery. Before you get any ideas…we just went were people recommended, but it seems the Irish are fascinated with drinking. This turned out to be Matthew’s favorite tour as it was very interactive and we got to become expert taste testers of whiskey. One reason the Jameson tastes so good is that it undergoes a triple distillation process (separating alcohol from the water) which is good for whiskey (bourbon only has a single distillation process and scotch has a double distillation process). I read in a local magazine after our tour that Ireland used to produce 60% of the world’s whiskey and now just 4%. They still act like they have the market on whiskey – rightfully so – Jameson and ginger ale is yummy!

Jameson distillery tour




We took yet another cab (yes, because we couldn’t locate the Hop On bus) and headed straight to the hotel for a quick change of clothes for our pub crawl. Before you get too excited…the tour ended up being sold out when we arrived at the meeting location! We were actually a little relieved after the initial disappointment as we figured enough with the drinks already. We made the best of our now free evening by grabbing a nice dinner at Foley’s Pub and Restaurant down the street from the hotel. Matthew chatted up one of the servers and found out about a card house down the street called Fitzwilliams card house. He enjoyed a rousing card of poker with some locals and then we called it a night.