Dublin: Day 2

With only one day left in Dublin, we decided to do what the stereotypical American tourist would do: tour of the Guinness factory and a pub-crawl. While these are both activities that I would recommend to people visiting Dublin, I would not necessarily recommend doing them back-to-back on the same day.

The Guinness factory is the Disneyland of beer. During my limited time in Ireland, I have discovered that they have a flair for extremely elaborate, borderline cheesy museum exhibits, and the Guinness Experience did not disappoint. The entire thing is built to be shaped like the world’s largest glass pint. We smelled the four “elements” of Guinness emanating steaming glass orbs, learned how to expertly taste Guinness in a Victorian style portrait lined room, and ultimately scored a couple free pints at the panoramic bar at the very top.

My mother is unable to have gluten, so I may have had more than my fair share of Guinness.

Then, we walked from the Guinness storehouse to Phoenix Park. The nice buzz I had going from the Guinness factory could not compare to how drunk with joy I felt to be standing in Europe’s largest urban park.

To round out the evening, we went on a literary pub-crawl of Ireland. I was expecting it to be more like “Here – drink a pint in the exact chair that James Joyce was sitting in when he wrote that one chapter of Ulysses” but it was more like “Stand over here while you watch your tour guides perform various scenes from Irish literature on a street corner.” To be honest, I’m not that crazy about Irish literature. My favorite “Irish” author is probably Flannery O’Connor. But it was entertaining enough, and we crawled to some pretty great pubs. I returned to my fancy hostel, not in a condition to wake up at 3:50 in the morning to catch my flight to Rome.