How Henry VIII messed up my Sunday in Ireland

First, I'm going to the Notre Dame-Michigan game on Saturday, so I figured I should finish my posts about Ireland before that.  Hopefully I'll have more on that soon.

And before I explain how Henry VIII messed up my Sunday, a few other thoughts about Ireland.  I was wondering how weird it would be with people driving on the left side of the road.  When I was in my cab from the airport to the hotel, I thought it wasn't that weird.  But when I was crossing streets, I looked the wrong way a couple of times and almost wandered out into oncoming traffic.  Fortunately, many of the streets had writing on them telling you which way to look when crossing.  Also, what was really weird was signing signs written in Irish and English, with the Irish first (which is also weird because nobody speaks Irish anymore).  That really gave me a sense of being in a foreign country.  And finally, it was cool listening to the accents.  It was always nice to hear American accents.  And I would say definitively that the Irish accent is better than the English accent (I had layovers in London so I got to hear the English accent a good amount).

I had a lot that I wanted to do on my Sunday in Ireland.  I wanted to get to the Guinness Storehouse, Kilmainham Gaol, Brazen Head Pub, and Trinity College.  And of course, it was Sunday, so I had to go to mass.

I figured there had to be a St. Patrick's in Dublin.  I googled it and sure enough, there's a St. Patrick's Cathedral.  There was a mass at 9:15 in the morning, so I was thinking that was perfect.  I'd get an early start to my day and then have plenty of time for everything else.  There was just one problem that I didn't realize until I got to St. Patrick's:  it's an Anglican church.

I had to find a Catholic church.  I figured out how to navigate Dublin pretty quickly when I knew where I wanted to go, but now I didn't know where I was going.  I started walking around and there are two more Protestant churches right by St. Patrick's.  Stupid Protestant Reformation.  Eventually I asked for directions and found a Catholic church that had a mass at 10:30.  Of course, after mass I walked past several other Catholic churches.

From mass, I went to the Guinness Storehouse.  My friend Jon gave it a kind of unenthusiastic review, but I had to go.  I genuinely enjoy beer and Guinness is the only foreign beer that I drink on a somewhat regular basis.  I enjoyed learning a lot about the history and making of Guinness.  My favorite fact was that Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000 year lease when he opened his brewery.  I liked the way the Storehouse was set up.  You had to go up several levels to get to the Gravity Bar at the top where a free pint of Guinness was waiting.  But no worries, there was plenty of Guinness to be had along the way (there were small free samples or you could buy a pint at various places).  I enjoyed seeing some old Guinness advertisements.  This one was my favorite:

This reminds me of what Benjamin Franklin said:  "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

I had always heard that Guinness was better the closer you were to Ireland and that it was served warmer in Ireland than in the US.  As for the first, I didn't really notice much of a difference.  But when I came back and had a Guinness at Finnegan's in Huntington, I would say I noticed a little bit of a difference and I would give Guinness in Ireland the edge.  As for the temperature, I did not notice any difference.  Maybe the entire city of Dublin decided that they were serving Guinness at American temperatures for the week with 35,000 Americans in town, but if not, I didn't notice any difference.  Anyway, when you get to the Gravity Bar, it's round and about 350 degrees of the circle are covered by glass.  On the glass are captions that tell you what you're looking at.  One of the captions talk about the Wellington Monument.  It honors the Duke of Wellington who was born in Dublin and defeated Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo.  On the one hand, Napoleon was a scumbag.  On the other hand, if everybody who defeated the French in battle had their own monument...

No caption needed.

Me enjoying a free Guinness at the Gravity Bar

From there, I was on my way to Kilmainham Gaol (pronounced jail).  It was used from the late 1700s until 1924.  I think they said on the tour that about 85% of the prisoners were common criminals and the other 15% were political prisoners.  I might be wrong on those numbers, but there were many Irish patriots executed there.

After that, I went to Brazen Head Pub with some Notre Dame fans from Iowa that I had befriended.  Brazen Head Pub has been around since 1198 which makes it Ireland's oldest pub.  We had a good dinner (I wasn't a big fan of the food in Ireland, but this was pretty good) and a few pints of Guinness.  By that time, it was too late to get to Trinity College.  Fortunately I had enough time to get there before flying home the next day or I would have been really mad at Henry VIII.

I had a lot of fun in Ireland, but it was good to get back to the United States, where we spell our words the correct American way and drive on the right side (as in the non-left side and correct side) of the road.