Ireland! My job sent me there at the end of April, and of course Julie came with me on this one. We took a red eye over, snatched about maybe 2 hours of bad sleep on the plane. Landed, got in a car, learned how to drive in the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the street in a busy downtown Dublin with a head stuffed full of sheep giving me angry looks for the lack of a fence to jump over. Went to tour Kilmainham Gaol to kick the day off. That's a picture up there. We were led around by an angry Irish tour guide with a thick angry Irish brogue, so I have no idea what happened there. Bad things done to Irish people by bad British people is about all I got. Then we went to St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Johnathan Swift is buried in the floor. See? There he is.
The floors are really pretty. There's worse places to be buried.
By way of an interlude in the middle of a bunch of boring church pictures, we only had four days in Ireland, and for two of them I had to work. So I was a bit frantic to see as much as I could. Julie, on the other hand, got the full four days and is also a fan of James Joyce, so she really got to live it up.
Hmph.
I'm not sure if this, being an empty keg of Guinness, is a double entendre or not; they do say that the Irish have a good sense of humor, however.
Speaking of Guinness, in order to help us stay awake for the rest of the day we of course went to the Guinness brewery. It was lame, but we graduated from Guinness-pour University so that's good.
Unfortunately, it didn't really work. Being exhausted and then having a Guinness is a bad idea before driving in backwardsopia. Went to the hotel, napped, got up for dinner, had a terrible time on a literary pub crawl that was led by a small dehydrated man with a gummy mouth and his friend, who did unsettling bits from Waiting for Godot. We ditched it and ate what we later thought might have been dog-food at some downtown carvery / pub. I went to work the next day at the Lansdowne Rugby Club. Check this guy out! Look at that face!
That's it for now. Next post, day four in Northern Ireland.
Yeah yeah yeah, we're queer. But at least we were drunk.
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