St. Patrick's weekend in Dublin

"Living" in Europe has some great advantages; namely travel. Traveling from one country to another can be as cheap as £20 for a round trip ticket and take as little as an hour. That being said: What a great excuse to fly to Dublin, Ireland for St. Patrick's weekend! :-)

I set off on my flight on Friday afternoon from the Aberdeen airport using a budget airline named "Ryan Air". You MUST have a look at their web site... it's even "budget"! For £11 each way you can book a flight to Dublin (that's about $22 plus taxes and fees)! Some of their fares are as low as £0.01 ... that's ONE penny! Here is the catch: once you are on board you are charged for everything (including a cup of water). They also try to sell you everything from lotto tickets, to bus passes, to taxi rides. I'm surprised there wasn't a fee to use the toilet!

Once we landed and the recorded trumpets announced that I was on board another "on time flight" (surreal), I hopped on the bus to the Dublin city centre. After getting off of the bus and wandering around the city centre for an hour in the rain looking for my hotel (it ended up being right across the street from my bus stop) I stopped into an Irish pub for a Guinness and bowl of Irish stew. What a great way to start your weekend.

After checking into the hotel and assessing the weather (raining), I decided that it might be best to get on the bus and head to the Guinness Brewery at St. James Gate. Now, for those of you who know me well you know that ME going to the brewery on St. Pat's weekend is akin to a Muslim going to Mecca for Ramadan... it's something I knew I had to do once in my lifetime. The tour itself was something that has to be seen to be described... Guinness has built 7 story, pint glass shaped tourist attraction in the middle of the brewery. You can view the history of the brewery, the brewing process, sample beer from the production line, and even be trained to pour the perfect pint. I know Nat was probably getting annoyed as I was calling her every 15 minutes saying "Guess what I just did?", or "Guess what I just saw?" If you didn't get a call from me during my brewery visit, count yourself as one of the lucky ones... I was annoying everyone else in my contact list ;-).

After buying a few souvenirs and drinking my free pint I got back on the bus and headed back to the hotel to get a good nights rest.

Saturday morning I got up early and jumped on a tour bus that stopped every so often so that you could get off and see some of the historical sites around Dublin. It was raining pretty hard all day, so my pictures are pretty limited. In between getting soaked and fighting the crowds I managed to see St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin Castle, the Jameson whiskey distillery, the Chester Beatty Library and *ahem* several local pubs (Including Bill Clinton's favorite pub "Ryan's"). A quick return the hotel and I was off again on a "Literary pub crawl"... who knew you could actually LEARN while drinking Guinness??? The pub crawl was really quite interesting as I am quite fond of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde (I even wrote a college paper on Wilde's life). Once again it was an early night as a few thousand American college students had descended on Dublin's Temple Bar district for spring break (I'm just too old to deal with these kinds of crowds *sigh*).

On Sunday it was back onto a Ryan Air flight to Aberdeen. You can check out the few pictures I was able to take here.

-Brady