Dublin, Ireland Christmas/New Year's 1999 Road Trip December 18th - Arrive in Dublin We arrive in Dublin after a short British Airways flight. The flight was wonderfully smooth and comfortable. Upon arriving, we were greeted with a blast of cold air and a friendly taxi driver for the car rental company. He drove us to the car lot where we picked up what was to be our mode of transportation for the next few days: A Toyota Van (manual transmission)     This turned out to be quite a remarkable van. It could actually fit all five of us plus all of our luggage while still managing to fit (usually) in the narrow lanes of the Irish roads. I give much credit to my father who acted as our full-time chauffeur for this trip. Driving on the left side of the road with the driver's controls on the left side of the vehicle turned out to be a bit of a challenge. Well, to be honest: based on my father's response to driving, it seemed to be a most traumatic challenge! I'm not sure I would have been able to remain as calm as he did behind the wheel of this Red Monster. Trinity College While in Dublin, we had to visit the history Trinity College. This was a wonderfully old place and I made it a point to go see their libraries. What follows are some of the things we saw at the college: This is the view of the court yard after you make it through the main entrance to Trinity College. It's pretty nice, isn't it? Imagine what it would look like on a nice sunny day. There is a nice grassy field where you can lay out under the trees and relax while enjoying the day. The main area (the paved part) is done in bricks. It looks cool, but I bet it's tough to ride on with a bike, blades, and it even got uncomfortable walking on it in shoes! There are several other buildings surrounding us at this point, you'll see some of them shortly. It's a good sized campus and reminded me (in size) of Kalamazoo College. Not huge, but big enough to accommodate a nice crowd of students. To the left of that tower above is this statue. I can't, for the life of me, remember who it is but he looked grumpy. We had just finished touring the Long Room (below), and we were on our way out to go find some place to eat dinner. It was beginning to get much colder out, too. I had to get this picture of me in front of their library. This is the smaller library next to the Long Room (a.k.a. the Old Library) where I saw TONS of materials at the front desk apparently waiting to be shelved and put into the catalog. They were closed, so I couldn't go in. Bummer!  The Book of Kells This book contains a lavishly decorated copy, in Latin, of the four gospels. It was brought to Dublin in 1653 for reasons of security during the Cromwellian period and ended up at Trinity college through the agency of Henry Jones, after he became bishop of Meath in 1661. This is a beautifully illustrated manuscript. I loved the display the college had set up so you could see how it was written: the materials, the methods, and the history behind this work. I really liked it! The Long Room in the Trinity College Library This was the view I had after exiting the Book of Kells exhibit (click the picture to make it bigger). It was simply breath-taking! This main chamber is nearly 65 meters in length and houses around 200,000 of the Library's oldest books. This room also houses one of the dozen or so remaining copies of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. I stood right here for the longest time and just gawked at it! The Guinness Brewery After about 30-40 minutes of wandering throughout Dublin, we finally stumbled upon the Guinness Brewery! I was extremely happy to finally find the place; I was getting both cold and thirsty. Here, I found relief for both conditions.   These are the two sides of the ticket to the tour. I managed to get the student rate! (Thank you M-Card!) This ticket included a free Pint of Guinness at the pub in the building. It was wonderful!   Our tour of the brewery was conducted by Rhonda, this charming red-headed woman who educated me in the history and brewing process of my favorite alcoholic beverage. Thanks, Rhonda, for letting me take this picture! (She was SO embarrassed!)   The tour began by going through a large museum of memorabilia. There were plaster displays like this one set up all over the place. Apparently, Guinness was supposed to make you strong. I'm currently doing testing on this hypothesis and I'll let you know how it goes. Preliminary results are good. At the very least it makes you THINK you're strong!       No, no, no...This picture was taken BEFORE my family and I had our free pint in the pub. People thought it was most odd that anyone would do this kind of pose. I got the most interesting looks from fellow museum visitors.   O.K. I know...this is rather trite, but don't you love the ostrich with the pint stuck in its throat? You see here all of the animals that Guinness uses in advertisements. After the memorabilia museum, we got a tour which was an explanation of the brewing process. Very interesting...did you know that they use the same strain of yeast used when the brewery was originally founded? My family ended the tour with a nice, cool, creamy pint of Guinness. It sure did help relieve my fatigue and completely refreshed me.   Road Trip December 19th - Shopping in Dublin  Today we wandered around Dublin, exploring the many shops at our disposal and enjoying the street performances like the one below. Not all of the performances were as organized as this one. There were some people who just spread out their coat on the ground and started singing, while others played an instrument. The amount of people here was amazing! Hordes of people just flowing around through the streets, buying merchandise, food (produce, mostly), and listening to the street performers. We found one of Ireland's nicest cafeteria-style restaurants. It's a place called Bewley's and it is, apparently, one of the places famous Irish authors like James Joyce came to eat. The food here was pretty good. I got the vegetarian breakfast as I know what they use to make their black and white puddings in Ireland! :-)                 One thing I noticed, though, was that a lot of the stuff we take for granted (condiments like butter, jam, etc.) were not complimentary here. As I found out, this is the rule rather than the exception in the UK. I also had to get used to having baked beans for breakfast. That wasn't too bad, but it was certainly different!