My trip to Dublin

Dublin
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This is the scenic river Liffey in the heart of tourist dublin (the part I basically stayed in) on O’Connell street. Basically, the three girls and I bought a Dublin city tour bus pass that let us hop on this bus loop anytime we wanted between way before we were up and around 6pm. The tour took us around most of the major sights in Dublin, which let us see most everything in a very busy two days.

The building you can see with the green top in the above picture has some story to it, but the part I remember is that someone sent a mob to destroy it, but apparently it was such a beautiful day that they decided to go swimming instead of tearing down the building.

But anyways, here’s the group photo, along the coast of southern Ireland:

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One of the things that the tour guide pointed out to us, but I didn’t get a picture of was a statue of Molly. I think there’s something right with a culture when they erect a bronzed statue of the city’s most famous whore right next to Trinity college.

Also in the same vicinity was the original Bank of Ireland building, which in fact used to be the headquarters:

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The really interesting thing about this building is that it has no windows. Security? Nope—apparently when it was built there was a tax on the amount of daylight in any building. No windows reduced cost. Also, this was apparently the origin of the phrase “daylight robbery.”

We also took a tour of the Guiness factory. The tour itself was inventive and charming. While I still don’t like drinking Guiness that much, I definitely like the company. Apparently, Arthur Guiness signed the lease for the land in 1756 (several hundred acres or more, I don’t remember) for the next 9,000 years at a price of 45-pounds annual.

They also have a huge tube of Guiness:

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And lastly I’ll mention the best fun-fact from our tour of Dublin Castle. This statue of Justice:

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…has her blindfold off. Not only that, but this is in fact a statue mounted on the outer wall of the castle, facing inwards, towards the chambers where British monarchs and aristocracy ruled the people of Dublin. But the best part is that when it rained, water used to run down the arm and actually tip the scales of justice, so that they weren’t in balance. I’m not sure if you can make it out in this photo, but they eventually drilled holes in the scales so they would at least look equal.

I’ve uploaded several more pictures of Flickr, so you can check those out here if you’d like.