day one: dublin continued

from here on out, i can't guarantee the quality or specificity of our adventures. there are a multitude of reasons for why this is the case... and i won't comment on them... see the above statement re: no guarantee of quality.

we arrived in dublin and made our way to our hotel but it wasn't ready for us, so we dropped our bags and made our way to get some food. the hordes of people who were surprisingly not drunk were making their way to the parade. we decided to go with the flow with the hopes of finding some decent irish food for lunch. we had missed breakfast so we were starving.

we managed to find a place called Flanagan's, which was on the main parade street, the place was empty since everyone was watching the parade. the only neighbors we had were also americans who were stopping for lunch spread out across two tables. N had the jumbo breakfast for lunch (which included beans, two sausages, ham and chips - read: fries), i had fish and chips with a side of vegs. we had two pints of Guinness to wash it all down. the meal was great and the Guinness wasn't bad at all. :)

after lunch we headed towards the old jameson distillery to check out irish whisky, which i hadn't had much of over the years. the tour itself wasn't all that interesting, anyone who know anything about making alcohol (or read a wikipedia entry about it, knows just much as anyone who would have gone through the tour), but the great part of the tour was that we were volunteers to do a tasting to compare scotch, irish whisky and american whiskey. we tasted johnny black, jameson and jack daniels... the differences were pretty astonishing. nothing puts things into contrast than drinking things side by side. N still preferred the scotch. i think the clean finish of the jameson was nice. i think the 12 year version would have been more complex (the 5 year just didn't have enough depth).

we walked back towards the hotel by taking the river pathway (we got lost a bit trying to find a distillery in the first place). thankfully the hotel had our room ready, but they didn't have our two twin room ready... instead we go two separate doubles!!! so i'm in my own room right now, nursing a carlsberg and write this before we head out to the pubs and enjoy the rest of the evening.

tmw - with any luck we'll head out to Guinness' storehouse and see how it's made. i'd love to make it out to the irish coast, but that may be asking for more than we'd hope.

i'd post photos, but that requires more coordination than i can muster at this point. so that might be after the trip.