Dublin at last

After finding our way through customs and immigration, grabbing a city map and catching a bus to our hotel, there wasn't much time left in the day for exploring. We grabbed a quick bite to eat at a nearby pub (more on the food later) and crashed. The next morning, finally showered, rested and clean-shaven, we set out on our first adventure.

Dublin is an interesting city - exciting, international and cultural but at the same time quaint, cozy and intimate. All that aside, though, Dublin is really all about the beer. It is a challenge to find a full-sized city block without a pub in this town, and half of them double as historical landmarks of one sort or another.

The people - rarely met without a pint of Guinness in hand - are warm, witty and bright-eyed. We had plenty of opportunities to banter with the locals, and - as is the case with most everywhere else we ended up visiting in Ireland - they proved to be some of the most sociable people we've encountered.

Still, large swaths of the city have turned into tourist traps of an interesting nature. Many visitors come for the pub experience, so pubs have popped up everywhere with claims of "Traditional Irish Food & Music" that are as thin as the building walls. We quickly learnined that about 90% of the pubs in Dublin are basically worthless for food - bland soup, dry bread and watery stew. The food that is worthwhile - strictly found by recommendation - is fantastic, though. By and large, however, it wasn't until we reached the countryside that we wre able to experience real Irish food.

Historical sites are of course littered throughout the city as well; we explored old dusty libraries, historic book collections, high-arched cathedrals and sweeping stone Universities. All with a backdrop of steel-gray skies and flickering Guinness signs, Dublin was a pretty cool spectacle.

With one less day to explore than expected, we were packing our bags soon and preparing for perhaps the most anticipated part of the trip - the rental car. More on that to come...