DAY-40: Dublin, Getting Smarter & Drinking Brews
Day – 40: Sunday, October 1, 2017
Starting Location: Dublin, Ireland
Ending Location: Dublin, Ireland
As someone said let today be a day of rest. We were in no hurry to get up and going this morning so it was about 11 AM when we headed down to breakfast. The breakfast was a good one; I had French Toast with of course bacon. The hotel is in an old building but the inside is very modern with a wide variety of what some would term modern (aka weird) art. One breakfast table is situated so that the diner gets an up close and personal butt shot of a sculpture, certainly makes for a most interesting setting.
After breakfast we headed over to Trinity College to get a bit smarter.
We visited the fabled Trinity Library but most importantly viewed the "Book of Kells" and other ancient documents on display at the college.
The fact that many of these manuscripts are over 1200 years old is somewhat amazing but more amazing is that the scribes back in the ninth century either didn't make errors in their scripts or they had some means of correction that was undetectable, perhaps they actually had some form of ancient spell-checker. Not surprisingly no photos were permitted of the ancient documents so I have borrowed Wiki pictures.
It's not clear to me just how anyone translated this stuff, is it possible these manuscripts are in reality the precursor to Marvel Comics, they are colorful?
As for the Trinity Library the many aisles and rows of books at least looked old, no telling if the books were real or Memorex.
Would have thought by now that J. K. Rowling would have a place of honor amongst the rows of gentlemen writers but perhaps it's a Irish/English thing.
I understand that Trinity College has to bear the expense of retaining and displaying the Book of Kells but the concept of commercialization, high fashion and of course the obligatory "library" store, seems a bit odd.
From getting smarter at Trinity we moved on to more pleasurable things as in beer, that would be Guinness. We walked through he streets of Dublin to the Guinness Storehouse, home to the Guinness "experience".
The Guinness visitor center and tour is a great one, the best beer tour I've experienced. Basically on a self-guided tour you rise from the ground floor, base of the pint of Guinness, to the frothy head at the 6th floor.
Along the way you experience the Guinness process from sourcing of barley, hops, water, etc. through the production and commercialization. There's even a tasting demo where little bitty "pints" ...
are served in an effort to give the customers a true sense of the variety of sensations one should receive from drinking a pint of two.
Ultimately the tour ends on the 6th and highest level of the building, the Gravity Bar where the admission tickets actually convert to pints of Guinness or other company brews and if desired a soft drink or water.
The Gravity Bar offers a 360 degree view of Dublin while sampling a pint of Guinness along with hundreds of your newest best friends.
Having experienced a "high" at Guinness (high as in elevation if you were wondering), we taxied back to the hotel for a short respite.
By 7 PM we were back on the streets, this time in search of the rare Starbucks "Dublin" coffee mug. Apparently there are over 50 Starbucks stores in Dublin so finding a mug would not be a problem. It did take two stores before we met with success, but heh it's a popular item.
After one more stop for a couple of "Zero Sugar Cokes" for me ...
we headed back toward the hotel fully intending to stop along the way for dinner.
En-route we passed any number of restaurants and pubs including one that was a "Steeler Bar" with today's game on the TV.
For dinner we settled into Wallace's Taverna. Wouldn't have thought that there were too many of the Wallace clan in Italy but who knows. Actually Wallace's was a good find. The Caprese salad, the ravioli and the spaghetti were great.
That was really it for our day. Though of note it is somewhat of a sad/happy day in that the vaunted New England Patriots went down to defeat. I'll leave it to your imagination how a Patriot loss can make for both sad and happy emotions within the family.
As someone said let today be a day of rest. We were in no hurry to get up and going this morning so it was about 11 AM when we headed down to breakfast. The breakfast was a good one; I had French Toast with of course bacon. The hotel is in an old building but the inside is very modern with a wide variety of what some would term modern (aka weird) art. One breakfast table is situated so that the diner gets an up close and personal butt shot of a sculpture, certainly makes for a most interesting setting.After breakfast we headed over to Trinity College to get a bit smarter.
We visited the fabled Trinity Library but most importantly viewed the "Book of Kells" and other ancient documents on display at the college.
It's not clear to me just how anyone translated this stuff, is it possible these manuscripts are in reality the precursor to Marvel Comics, they are colorful?
As for the Trinity Library the many aisles and rows of books at least looked old, no telling if the books were real or Memorex.
Would have thought by now that J. K. Rowling would have a place of honor amongst the rows of gentlemen writers but perhaps it's a Irish/English thing.
I understand that Trinity College has to bear the expense of retaining and displaying the Book of Kells but the concept of commercialization, high fashion and of course the obligatory "library" store, seems a bit odd.
From getting smarter at Trinity we moved on to more pleasurable things as in beer, that would be Guinness. We walked through he streets of Dublin to the Guinness Storehouse, home to the Guinness "experience".
The Guinness visitor center and tour is a great one, the best beer tour I've experienced. Basically on a self-guided tour you rise from the ground floor, base of the pint of Guinness, to the frothy head at the 6th floor.
Along the way you experience the Guinness process from sourcing of barley, hops, water, etc. through the production and commercialization. There's even a tasting demo where little bitty "pints" ...
are served in an effort to give the customers a true sense of the variety of sensations one should receive from drinking a pint of two.
Ultimately the tour ends on the 6th and highest level of the building, the Gravity Bar where the admission tickets actually convert to pints of Guinness or other company brews and if desired a soft drink or water.
The Gravity Bar offers a 360 degree view of Dublin while sampling a pint of Guinness along with hundreds of your newest best friends.
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| The Brewery |
By 7 PM we were back on the streets, this time in search of the rare Starbucks "Dublin" coffee mug. Apparently there are over 50 Starbucks stores in Dublin so finding a mug would not be a problem. It did take two stores before we met with success, but heh it's a popular item.
After one more stop for a couple of "Zero Sugar Cokes" for me ...
En-route we passed any number of restaurants and pubs including one that was a "Steeler Bar" with today's game on the TV.
For dinner we settled into Wallace's Taverna. Wouldn't have thought that there were too many of the Wallace clan in Italy but who knows. Actually Wallace's was a good find. The Caprese salad, the ravioli and the spaghetti were great.
That was really it for our day. Though of note it is somewhat of a sad/happy day in that the vaunted New England Patriots went down to defeat. I'll leave it to your imagination how a Patriot loss can make for both sad and happy emotions within the family.
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