Dublín

The last weekend in February, I met a friend in Dublin, and we had a great time.
We met in the airport on Friday evening and set out to find our hostel, which was downtown. We checked in and went to bed, since neither of us is the going out type and we had a long day planned.
This is the hostel. The green blur is me not realizing that there was a picture being taken.
We got up bright and early the next morning, enjoyed the complimentary breakfast (milk for drinking!), and headed to St. Patrick's. The cathedral was very different from most of the cathedrals I've seen, partly because it's really young and it also has a lot of Irish architecture (of course). Also, I was a bit disappointed that they still call St. Patrick's a cathedral, because it is non-denominational now, and it's not the bishop's church. In Spain, especially in the middle ages and golden age, having a cathedral was very important, and the distinction between a cathedral and a normal church is still very clear here. St. Patrick's did a very good job though of being a big, beautiful church.
Floor tiles, which were very decorative and very non-Spanish
The organ where Handle played (they also had a really old (possibly original) copy of the Messiah)
This is a monument/ tomb for the Boyle family. The little Boyle in red in the middle is the famous chemist, Robert Boyle.
Apparently, John Wesley also preached here and served communion in a silver service that he later donated to the church. Someone stole it, but the Methodists donated a replica, but it was behind glass and didn't photograph well.
Upon leaving the church, we stumbled across the oldest public library in Dublin, and we contemplated going in, but it wasn't open yet and we had other things to go see, but we still took a picture.
Also, the guy who founded it has the same last name as my favorite Lawrence president.
The garden where St. Patrick allegedly baptized converts wasn't open either, but we took some pictures of that too.
Our next stop was Trinity College to see the book of Kells, which ended up being a bit of an adventure. My friend left me in charge of directions, and when I do directions I just walk in the general direction of where I'm headed, so that's what we did. Except we went the wrong way. Luckily, we figured it out without too much daño and found Trinity College, etc.
The Book of Kells is a really old illustrated New Testament, and it was really cool, especially with the display, but it really couldn't hold a candle to the Trinity college library, which was an amazing long room filled floor to ceiling with really old books. They didn't allow pictures, but there are some on-line on the library's web-page: http://www.tcd.ie/Library/heritage/longroom.php
After visiting Trinity College and seeing the Book of Kells, we started looking for a bench on which to eat our picnic lunch on our way to Guinness. I didn't anticipate any problems with finding a place to eat, but there aren't very many benches in Dublin, and we spent a long time looking for one, but we did eventually find a place to eat. We had quite an impressive picnic, mostly because my señora packed me my weight in food, and it was really a beautiful day for a picnic.
After lunch, we went to Guinness. The journey to the museum was a little like my walk around Palatine Hill. Guinness is actually huge, and we didn't really know where the museum was, so we just walked around it, assuming that we would eventually get there, which was accurate, even if we did end up walking much further than necessary. Walking around the entire Guinness plant also gave us an opportunity to take lots of pictures of signs that said "Guinness", and we talked about how jealous my dad would be.
I didn't take this picture, since my self-portrait skills are not that good and my friend always has her eyes closed when I take a picture of both of us.
The Guinness museum was fairly interesting, and most of it was about the process of making beer, which I was already familiar with. It was still really interesting because it was very interactive and the even had places where you could taste the beer and its components at different stages. They also had a huge sandbox of barley, which reminded me of the corn table in preschool...
At the end of the museum tour, you can get a pint of Guinness or a soda, and since my friend and I were convinced that we wouldn't both be able to drink a pint, we got one of each and shared. Surprisingly, I thought Guinness tasted much better than the clear beers I've had (I'm going to blame my dad for the dark-beer genes).

Here's our pint.

The bar is on the top of the museum in a glass room that had some really excellent views, so I took some pictures of the Guinness plant for my dad and some of the mountains for me.

After several hours at Guinness, we decided to try to walk to the ocean before finding dinner, and the walk was very beautiful, but the sun set before we could actually get to the ocean (later, we looked at a map and it's actually kind-of tricky to get to the ocean, since they have the harbor and all).
We have no idea what this old boat is, but I thought my sister would like it.
When we finally started looking for a place to have dinner, we were looking for a pub, but there was England v Ireland in the rugby play-off's so all of the pubs were full, and we went to a Chinese restaurant instead. The food was really good, and the vegetarian entrees were really cheap, which made up for not being able to get a Strongbow with dinner. Since we were exhausted from our day, we picked up some snack food (Strongbow, chocolate, chocolate-chunk cookies dipped in chocolate, and Mars bars) and spent the rest of the evening in the hostel.I had to catch my flight early the next afternoon (thanks to the 4-hour travel adventure between the Madrid airport and Salamanca), so we spent the morning in the botanical garden.

It was wonderful, because it was warm and green and there were spring flowers blooming, and I really didn't want to go back to brow, rainy Spain.
Good thing that I couldn't see how difficult the trip back woul be, or I might have decided just to stay. I got to the airport pretty early, since I get too nervous if I'm not there at least an hour before my flight, which was very good because I got randomly selected for additional screening. The people at security took everything out of my backpack, and even took some of the things I'd bought out of their box. Good thing I never travel with anything illegal. Then, once I got to Madrid, I had to wait more than 2 hours because all of the buses were full, and during that time, someone stole my bus ticket, and I got to go get another one. The most annoying thing about the stolen bus ticket was that it was a non-refundable, open return ticket, that was assigned to the seat that was immediately in front of where I was sitting, and the seat was empty, which means that no one got anything out of it, except the bus company. I did make it back to Salamanca though, even if it was at 11pm.