A Saturday spent wandering Dublin is nothing dull, I can assure you. Yesterday, I witnessed the following: A marionnette playing a piano, a falun dafa parade (I guess it’s a meditation art), a weed legalisation parade, two men wearing giant leprechuan heads, and various street performances… my favorite was a band made of a violinist who played with the bow behind his back, a drummer pounding on a wooden box he was sitting on with little hackey sack moraccas taped to his shoes, a guy working an upright bass, and an acoustic guitar. Not bad for just walking down the street!<\/p>\n
<\/span>I also got lost walking around today… disappeared into a park and lost my sense of direction on the way out, ended up walking around for 20 minutes to get back to the same park. I forgot to mention before, street signs in Dublin are terrible… they are written on the sides of buildings and sometimes not at all. Occasionally, there is a post with an arrow type sign on it, and yet these same signs also point you to landmarks and districts… so there’s no way to tell if it’s marking a street or pointing you to something. Genius!<\/p>\n <\/span>I should also mention that the street names themselves are horrid. Many if not all of the streets only retain their names for a block or two, at which point they change. I thought Texas was bad… \u00c2\u00a0but to illustrate, one of the main streets in Dublin from west to east is called: Thomas Street, Cornmarket, High Street, Christchurch Place, Lord Edward Street, Dame Street, College Green, College Street, Pearse Street, Ringsend Road, etc. See for yourself on google maps! The names I gave describe about a 20-30 minute walk. Yeah.<\/p>\n <\/span>Getting lost was just fine by me, got to see a quieter side of town away from the tourist onslaught. The city is very clean and green throughout, and the prices a little off the main drags are still high but a little more reasonable. Once I made it back into the city, I found a nice little tourist information center where I finally grabbed a free city map… now that I’ve got it I’d say it’s essential.<\/p>\n <\/span>From there I walked over to the Guinness brewery despite some advice to take the tram there. It only took 15-20 minutes walk from the city center and it worked up a nice appetite. The tour there is kind of nice… it’s mostly self guided with audio-visual stuff, so you can go at your own pace. Lots of fun things to learn about Guinness there, my favorite was the fact that Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000 year lease at the brewery in 1700 something or other. I didn’t get a chance to read the lease, but I wonder if the rent is locked in… now that would be smooth!<\/p>\n <\/span>At the top I had my free pint and met some dudes from, drumroll please….. San Francisco. Wanh wanh. I guess they were from the same fraternity even though one was 23 and the other was 30. They were BOMBED… when they finished their Guinness, the younger one found a couple of unfinished ones on another table and snagged them. They were alledgedly there for 5 hours following this routine, and they hit the Jameson distillery beforehand. Wow. They may have even stolen one unattended glass that might have belonged to some lady who was checking out something out the window a few paces away, we never figured it out. \u00c2\u00a0They invited me to grab some burgers with them on the way out of the place, which I did. Thankfully, the older one mandated that they return to the hostel to get to bed early after. He had just come in that morning. I’m not sure how you operate on no sleep with jetlag and still do that kind of drinking, but he actually seemed in better shape than the young guy. Not my kind of folks, but entertaining for a couple hours!<\/p>\n <\/span>I wandered around the bar scene for a while, couldn’t seem to find a place I wanted to stay in… I ended up having a drink at a smaller place with some guys playing fiddle\/guitar. On my way home, I found some religious dudes holding signs that said John 3:7 or 17, not sure. There was a girl arguing with one of them vehemently, so I decided to stop and listen. Her friend tried to pull her away from the argument and then ended up talking to me… nothing like serious religious and political discussion at 1:30 in the morning on the streets of Dublin. Mind you the street I was on was more like an outdoor shopping mall, quite safe Mom.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span>By the end of it, the other girl had 3 or 4 of the religious dudes all arguing with her and her friend dragged her away as she shouted obsenities and imperatives to “Keep your prejudice to your F!&@ing selves!” I shortly learned that the cokes they were holding were spiked with Bacardi… and that it is illegal to drink on the street in Dublin (maybe Ireland?), but as one of the girls said, nothing is illegal if you don’t get caught. Errrr…<\/p>\n <\/span>They bought me a beer at a dance club called Copperhead Jack’s or something, and then I left them there. Again, not my kind of people, \u00c2\u00a0but interesting in a small dose. I slept in this morning and today I’ll just be taking it easy and getting ready to move from my hotel to a hostel tomorrow morning. Exciting times!<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Saturday spent wandering Dublin is nothing dull, I can assure you. 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