brassangel | Out and About in Dublin (Reply)

Sunday morning we overslept.

Once we were up and moving, we tried to go to Dublin Castle, but it was closed.

We did see bits of it from the outside.

We also saw the Dublin Gardens, behind the castle. The gardens includes a huge round grassy area with a labyrinth laid into it in tiles. We watched a young boy following the paths with with glee.

Next to the Dublin Gardens is the Chester Beatty library, where we were excited to find they had a disply of Leonardo Da Vinci's Leicester Codex.

Outside the Beatty library was a fountain with a statue commeorating the special olympics.

A duck and several duckling appear to live in the fountain. I spent some time taking pictures of them.

We had lunch at The Forum restaurant. Yummy soup!

Next we caught the H.O/H.O bus over to the bank of the Liffey, then walked a few short blocks to Jameson's Old Distillery.

Our Dublin pass got us in for free. While we were waiting for the tour I had an Irish coffee at the bar in the Lobby. Since it was still rainy and cold that irish coffee went down really REALLY well.

There were computers with interactive family trees of the Jameson family. On one of those, I discovered that one of the original Jameson's (great?) grandchildren was Marconi, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Before running an introductory video, the tour guide told us that everybody would get to taste a glass of Jameson's at the end of the tour.

Except four of us. Those four would get to taste FIVE whiskeys. Not being a whiskey drinker, I wasn't going to volunteer for this, but at the last moment some impulse made me throw my hand up in the air, and she picked me!

The tour was pretty interesting, and I took a lot of pictures (of course!). At the end, during the tasting, I discovered it's not whiskey in general that I dont like. It's scotch. I don't much appreciate peat. (Except for a really smoooothe scotch GianCarlo gave me a taste of at faire recently).

We still have most of a bottle of Powers Whiskey (which as it turns out is made by Jamesons) left. We had bought it back in limerick, because Tim said he wanted to numb the pain of his tooth woth it. He never touched it and we packed it to bring to Dublin with us.

Powers turned out to be one of the ones in the testing, along with Paddy, Jameson's, a scotch, and some J.D. After the tasting I got a cute little certificate saying that I am now an official taster, and I had tasted sparingly, so jim, who IS a whisky drinker, got to tast all of the tasters as well. Which assuaged my guilt that he hadn't been chosen. yay!

As I mentioned before, Jameson's is very close to the River Liffey, so after Jameson's we strolled along the Liffey,

up to the Ha'penny Bridge, which is the most famous bridge in Ireland.

I wanted to make sure that we had a chance to cross it. On the other side of the Hapenny, there was a picturesque little passageway with a lot of foot traffic.

I thought we should turn around and get to Temple Bar as we had made reservations to go on the Musical Pub Crawl which started at Gogarty's in the Temple Bar District.

(For any of you SecondLifers out there, this is the bar in the Dublin Sim that Keltish sometimes plays at. I wish I could get on there, but this puter won't let me)

Jim decided we should go ahead and go see where the passageway led. I must of gotten very turned around somehow, becasue that passageway let out right into Temple Bar.

We went to Gogarty's to wait, and shared a bowl of some very nummy veggie soup and Irish bread for dinner while we waited for the Pub crawl to get started. The leader of the musical pub crawl/the guitarist, led us all from Gogtgarty's to the Ha'penny bridge Inn,

where he and Alan the Accordianist played for us for an hour and discussed irish culture, music and instrtuments.

They then led us over the Ha'penny bridge, and over to a pub called Brannigan's, near the millenium spire(a.k.a the stiletto in the ghetto). This pub had a bunch of movie posters all over the place because it is near the Savoy theatre. According to our guitarist (no, I can;t remember his name) movie stars attending premeires there would sneak out and go to Brannigan's for drinks during the movies. he also said that the bar has ties to the 1916 Easter rising, as some of the men involved in the violence at the G.P.O. ran from there and his out in Brannigan's. At Brannigan's they sang and played and told jokes for another hour.

they told us a friend of theirs, Alan Doherty who played on the soundtrack to the LoTR would be playing with a bunch of his friends, just to please themselves, at Bowe's, a pub just down the street. Which is how I came to be sitting in a pub in Dublin, on midnight of July 9th, my birthday, sharing a cider with my husband and listening to a group of local musicians jamming for their own pleasure.