Love Me Some Guinness

Tribute to the lioness cub :)

Oh Dublin… how I was not looking forward to you! You’ve left me pleasantly surprised. I was looking forward to visiting Dublin until the day I arrived. I don’t know why I was in such a downer of a mood, but I just wanted to drop kick the city in the ass and find somewhere fun. Turns out, I had already found it; I just needed to open my eyes. I arrived pretty late on Wednesday so I swallowed some dinner and hit the pillow to try and hit the next day with a better attitude. It didn’t really go quite as planned.

Bored on a park bench

I spent Thursday running around the city from museum to museum to park to galleries to lots more. I somehow managed to do all that after breakfast and before a late lunch. I should have packed and ate in the park, but I ended up back at the hostel around 2:30 with the plan of heading to the Guinness Storehouse for a tour and pint from the Gravity Bar and catch the sunset. Bad plan… Because I wasn’t in the greatest of moods, I ended up catching up on emails and a bit of blogging… 4 hours (Guinness closed at 5pm) later I forced myself to get offline for dinner. It was shortly after dinner that my weekend started to turn around. I jumped online to email my Cork hosts and had a really great chat with two awesome people that made me much happier. It must have come across physically because a group in the hostel struck up a conversation with me. There was one really drunk old guy hitting on the young girls and we ended up creating a fictional story about one of the guys being the owner’s son and told him to leave. Problem solved.

Oh, how I love me some Guinness...

Friday was really awesome. I thought I’d swing by the Guinness Storehouse and make a quick tour before checking out some live music over lunch in Temple Bar. I arrived at Guinness around noon and walked out the front door at 5pm. What can I say; they put on a good tour. And you totally get a free pint at the end. If you’re badass like me, some girl will give you her stub because she doesn’t drink beer. In all honesty though, you could get plastered on what people leave behind. It depressed me how many people would take one sip and then set the pint down and walk away. What’s wrong with you people! I enjoyed mine over a conversation with JR, a dude from Germany that was wearing a Texas Longhorns cap. A bit odd, but friendly enough. Randomly, 3 people that checked out of the hostel that morning walked into the bar and joined the conversation. Why do I mention this? Well, read on…

At the top... Gravity Bar

We all parted ways and I headed back to the hostel. I stopped to check out the Ireland Film Institute (Really had to take a piss) and saw a traveler sitting on the wall waiting around with her bag. I didn’t have anywhere to be so I decided to say hello and make friends. It turns out she’s CouchSurfing and obviously with better luck than I had being that I was in a hostel. She was due to meet her host in 10 minutes so I stuck around until then.  I continued on to the hostel and as I was crossing the river I see the same 3 people from the hostel and Guinness (Don’t worry, it gets better). We say hello and goodbye because they need to catch a bus down to Cork. Back at the hostel, I took a 30 minute power nap to some classical music, jumped into the shower, and hung out the rest of the night. A group of Brazilians was staying at the hostel semi long term looking for work and were having a bbq (I know, my mouth watered a little bit too). I picked up some beers and joined the festivities. It was tasty. They danced the night away and we shared some good stories.

2011 Europe - Dublin