Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Kerry and I spent the weekend in Dublin, Ireland's capital. We flew in early saturday morning and immediately bought ourselves an unlimited bus pass for the weekend. The first stop was to visit the famous Jameson Whiskey distillery. The Irish are very proud of their whiskey and spent considerable time explaining why they think it is better than Scotch Whiskey. We sampled some of the whiskey before leaving, but Kerry and i not being massive Whiskey fans would have nodded in approval of a $2 bottle of aged petrol. Not knowing how whiskey was made we were both fascinated by the process. In the souvenir store they stock a 2000 euro bottle of whiskey. I'm not sure of the particulars of the bottle but i think it has aged in excess of 15 years.
Next stop was the Guinness factory. Now if there is one thing that the Irish are nutty about, it would have to be their Guinness. Rightly so, i think every tourist who goes to Dublin goes through the Guinness factory. After viewing how Guinness is made (very fascinating also), we perused a couple of floors of Guinness history and interesting facts about the "healthy" beer. The factory brews the equivalent of 3 million pints of Guinness per day, 1/3 of which is consumed in Ireland, the world takes the rest. The final thing to do was to drink a pint of Guinness on the top floor of the factory looking out over Dublin as the sun was setting.
Sunday we toured the Kilmainham Gaol. Kilmainham Gaol has played an important part in Irish history, as many leaders of Irish rebellions were imprisoned and some executed in the jail. The jail has also been used as a set for several films.
We spent the arvo looking through the natural history museum (full of stuffed animals, known in Dublin as the dead zoo), eating good food and drinking beer, which is what seems to be the thing to do in Ireland. We flew back to Newcastle on sunday night. We only took a few photos but you will see them in the "Ireland" gallery.
ps: I'd like to add i do too know the difference between whisky and petrol - was quite happy drinking jamesons though. The guys at work had told me that there was a vast difference between Guinness in England and the locally brewed stuff in dublin - they're completely right. The stuff we sell at the pub has a really burnt taste to it the Dublin Guinness didn't. Apparently Guinness doesn't travel well - so who knows how different it tastes once it's got to Australia!
Security in airports has gone nuts over the weekend. We noticed coming back into Newcastle Sunday night that the entrance for cars driving up to the drop off zone was blocked off by a security car, but didn't think anything of it. We didn't find out about the Glasgow Airport attack until today. One of our buses was meant to pick up a group at 8am at Heathrow yesterday but they were 3 hours late due to tightened security - think we're going to make sure we're nice and early for our flights from now on!
- comments