Our day started with a 5:15am taxi to the airport heading to Dublin!!!!
Famine memorial by the river to remember all the people who were affected and died by the famine.
Haha here's Aiofe signing Lukas' famous diary! He literally asks every person he meets to sign his diary...
Haha Lukas exercising! (Aka showing off)
Trinity college
Once we finished our lunch (eaten on the street) we headed over the Guinness storehouse.
So the "tour" at the Guinness storehouse is not really a tour but more of a guided walk where exhibits show the making of beer, history of Guinness, their advertisement can pain throughout the years etc. I actually thought it was super cool... And I don't even drink beer!
The best part of the tour was... Not the beer... But THE VIEW from the 7th floor :-)
Here's our guide Pete explaining something about the beers
We had 3 different beers to taste, the first one was the dark beer. We started by smelling the beer and describing the smell, then we took a sip, swirled the beer in our mouth to get the different flavors and described what we each though was in the beer. I actually guessed the "mystery" ingredient... Dark chocolate! Haha who knew that the non beer drinker would guess that!
I could barely taste the whiskey because it was very strong but apparently it was a good one!
Looking sleepy?!?
We finally arrived in Dublin after a long 50 mins airplane ride! Haha (all 50 of them we were all sleeping!)
We reached our great hostel and realized it was going to rain so after breakfast decided to go get some rain gear and get ready for the weather!
In the afternoon we took one of the many free walking tours that are offered in Dublin.
Our meeting point was "the spire"... A huge needle looking thing in the middle of the city. Once we met our guide she told us that building the spire was very controversial because at the time Dublin was having a huge problem with cocaine and somehow they decided to erect a big huge needle (actually, the tallest structure in Europe) right in the middle of the city.
Irish are well known for their humor so they have given the spire nicknames such as "the stiletto in the ghetto" or "the stiffy by the Liffey"
This tour took us to the south of Dublin city, which is the less touristy part but still full of history.
Statue from the legend about queen step mother converting her 3 step children into swans.
Then we walked by the market/ Asian part of town which was very interesting to see because it really brought me back to walking street markets in Vietnam or South America and I was not expecting such thing in Europe... But I guess Asians are everywhere!
At night we met my Irish friends Aiofe and Ais whom I met while traveling South America and hiked the inca trail together. For a fun night out we went to temple bar and hit a couple of bars/pubs with live music. The pubs were packed with people and the music was great (mostly English covers)... Who knew we could find such a party on a Monday night!!
Here we all are :-)
The next day we decided to take another free walking tour but this time through the most historic part of Dublin!
It's so awesome that Dublin has free wifi all over the city
We ended the tour by St Patrick's cathedral
After the tour we stopped by a very famous (and delicious) fish and chips stand to have some lunch! The portions were HUGE! For €9.25 we got a fish and chips plate that was so massive that we decided to share it between two people! Highly recommended! And the staff was lovely!
Once we finished our lunch (eaten on the street) we headed over the Guinness storehouse.
After spending two hours at the store house we walked back to the spire to take our next tour... A beer and whiskey tasting!
Bar 1: the black sheep
For the second tasting Peter asked us to take a sip of water and then smell the skin of our hand in order to neutralize our taste buds and smell. Then we proceeded to try a red ale and ended with some kind of IPA.
We then moved to a second bar... Where we tasted some Guinness and talked about why Guinness tastes different all around the world! (It's pretty much based on freshness)
Apparently Guinness ships the Guinness concentrate in a dry package and once it gets to the destination they are responsible for the hydration of the concentration and obviously the water everywhere tastes different, therefore the difference in taste.
Our third and last bar was the whiskey tasting.
I could barely taste the whiskey because it was very strong but apparently it was a good one!
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