Splitting the "G"
Self-guided tours, churches, and learning how to properly drink a pint of Guinness
After a lovely Irish breakfast we headed to our tour bus for a tour of Dublin. Naturally we were bogged down by the traffic, but it was still a nice tour. We had another tour guide, Denise, join us on the bus to talk about O’Connell Street, Phoenix Park, and Leinster House but she was very soft-spoken so it was hard to hear what she was saying at times. I did find it very interesting that you can see bullet holes on the O’Connell statue from the 1916 Easter Uprising, not that we could see them from the bus, but that’s a plan for another day.
Next, we visited EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum. EPIC stands for “Every Person Is Connected” and the museum went into great detail on why many Irish people emigrated, where they emigrated too, while also talking about the adversity, culture, and infamy of many Irish people. It was a fantastic museum, we only had an hour visit so had to speed through a few rooms but you could easily spend a whole day in EPIC with all there is to learn inside. I ended up buying a very nicely bound notebook in the gift shop as well as a book about teaching your cats Irish (still waiting to see how much my cat is progressing with that).
Onwards to Christ Church Cathedral for a self-guided tour. According to the trip itinerary, Christ Church Cathedral “begun in 1038 by King Sitric Silkenbeard, the Danish Viking King of Dublin.” I had no idea Ireland had a Viking history! I didn’t learn much else about it aside from that, but it’s something I’ll have to read more up on at some point.
The church was lovely. Even though none of us are practicing anymore, and even though the church is Protestant, I lit a candle for my mom and my dad, sister, and I said a little prayer to her. We looked around the church and saw St. Laurence O’Toole’s heart only it’s hard to say if his heart is still there. Apparently it was stolen at one point and returned but since the heart is encased in metal and is a relic it couldn’t be opened, so many people just assume his heart is still safely locked inside which is about as good a metaphor for having faith in the unknown and unseen as I can see. The crypt’s were especially fascinating. We saw where King Charles I and II were buried and learned that their graves are some of the oldest but not the most well-kept. Before the statues of the graves were taken to the crypts, many Irish people would throw bottles and desecrate them, so they don’t look the best and I can’t say I blame the Irish. We also saw a mummified cat and rat that were found in an organ which made me very sad to think about for too long, about how awful and slow a death that would be for both animals. James Joyce apparently wrote about the mummified cat and rat in Finnegan’s Wake, comparing their chase to the romance between two characters in his novel.
We also overheard a ghost story from a nearby tour. Many, many, many, many years ago a soldier was accidentally locked in the crypt overnight and in the morning all that was left of him was his broken sword, his ripped clothes, and some meat from his body. A swarm of rats had attacked him and it’s thought his sword broke as he was trying to fight them off before his death. Years later, a kid ran into the crypt and came out with the dead man’s sword, though the sword was already being kept in a case on display. So where did the second sword come from?
Dun dun dunnnnn
We went to the Dublin Castle next and honestly I can’t tell you much about it. It was self-guided but the guest tour guide we had on the bus gave us little information about what Dublin Castle actually was, even the PDF guidebook wasn’t very helpful. But it had some very beautiful paintings and artwork inside that I liked looking at. According to the website, Dublin Castle was “[c]onstructed in the early thirteenth century on the site of a Viking settlement, [and] served for centuries as the headquarters of English, and later British, administration in Ireland. In 1922, following Ireland’s independence, Dublin Castle was handed over to the new Irish government. It is now a major government complex and a key tourist attraction.” I did not learn any of this while visiting, but it was nice inside.
We finished early at the Dublin Castle and our next eagerly awaited stop, the Guinness Storehouse, was not ready for us yet, so we took a quick look at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and took some pictures where a very friendly dog was nosing around before we got back on the bus.
It was very busy at the storehouse, our tour guide Brendan had to drive around a bit to find a spot to drop us off and then did the amazing: parallel parked a tour bus. I think I’m a pretty good driver but I know I could never do that.
The Guinness Storehouse was also a self-guided tour and the storehouse is HUGE! It was wonderfully done, starting from when the Guinness family founded and bought a one-thousand year lease for the storehouse because they were that confident in their business (and were right) as well as the influence they had around Dublin as a whole.
We went through learning about how Guinness was made and what makes it special before making our way to the very top where we got a complimentary pint of Guinness to drink. Brendan had told us beforehand about “splitting the G,” meaning that your first sip of Guinness should end where your stout is halfway through the letter “G” on the glass. I was determined to do that and I don’t think I did too badly.
The Gravity Bar really did have a spectacular view of Dublin, and it’s just like everyone says, Guinness tastes better at the storehouse. I don’t know exactly how to describe it except that it tasted fresher, and not as dark as when I had to before at the Lough Eske.
My sister had a bit of her pint but isn’t a big stout fan, which mean that in the span of fifteen-minutes I had two pints of Guinness. Needless to say, I was a bit dizzy after that, which made leaving the storehouse all the more fun because while there are escalators that take you up to the various floors of the storehouse there are just stairs going down (and elevators if you’re patient, which I wasn’t). So we made our way down the stairwell, to the gift shop only for me to then have to climb the stairs up three levels because the lower gift shop did not have a shirt I wanted that I had seen on the third floor, while also needing to get back to the tour bus on time. I managed to do it, but it’s not recommended when you’ve downed nearly two pints of Guinness.
Fun times either way though!
My dad, sister, and I went back to Madigan’s for dinner and then we wandered around Dublin, taking a look at the River Liffey, walking over the Ha’penny Bridge, and then stopped for some gelato.
And as always, I learned a lot of interesting things:
The original flag of Ireland was green with a harp on it. Thomas Francis Moher created the current flag of Ireland, the green on the flag symbolizes Catholics, the orange symbolizes Protestants, and the white symbolizes peace between the two.
Speaking of the harp, Guinness was the first to use the harp on their logos before the Irish government. The Irish government had to swap the direction of the harp so that it was facing a different direction than the Guinness logo.
Punchy is an Irish moonshine made from potatoes and is 90-95% proof. It is illegal to make, and it’s name comes from a small pot that was used to store the drink to smuggle it away.
Four-leaf clovers are not really a symbol of Ireland, the shamrock is. Allegedly, St. Patrick used the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity to the pagan people of Ireland.
The word Dublin means “town of the hurdle ford” in Irish.
Roman Catholics were not allowed to study at Trinity College and needed a local Bishop to give attendees a dispensation to attend.
Leo the lion of MGM fame was bred in the Dublin zoo.
At one point in time the British would tax people on light coming in through their windows. When passing the Bank of Ireland, we could see areas where windows had been bricked up so that the building would not be taxed on the light coming in.
