Day 31...I'd be tinking about some potatoes. - 27th July

Woke up and had a home cooked breaky from the little old Irish ladies. They let us keep our car at their place so we wandered to the Internet cafe again and did some emails and phone calls. Then we did some quick wandering around the streets (did you know you can buy chipmunks for 10 pounds there?). We then decided to head to Dublin for lunch.

It took a while to get into Dublin and we arrived late lunchtime. It was an OK looking city, different to what I expected. The city centre was teh best aprt with higgeldy piggeldy streets and old buildings. We walked around Temple Bar a district thats supposed to be a highlight of Dublin but it was just grungy and alternative stuff there. Its weird. People try so hard to be all arty and different and deviate from everyone else, but they end up all the same in their own category. The same alternative scene there we have found in every other city. Quite sad when you think on it. I don't care what I wear anymore, I'll just stick on a purple hat and go and enjoy myself. I hate shopping.

We had a quick lunch then tried to head to Guinness headquarters which was a quick drive up the road. And 'try' being the operative word! Dublin cenre is the most frustrating, hair pulling place to drive I have ever encountered!!! We both kept our cool together really well I thought. I was proud of both of us. But Dublin! Ugh! We had two maps of the same area but they each decided to have certain streets and omit others so we had to check both maps to try and find the right streets. Each time we thought we had a route sorted it would en dup being a one way street that would divert us halfway around the centre, and then anotehr street would end up being a no through street even though it connected on the maps. It took about an hour or more to get 1.5 miles. (and it was peak hour too, so we had loads of cars to contend with too). We almost decided to head to the ferry but decided it was too important to miss eh! We finally got there and it was a big old brick building with old tram tracks on the outside. I felt like I had been transported to 1850 or something with horses about to come out of the gate with kegs of beer in the carriage! We lied at the entry and both got in as students. Guinness was a self guided tour over several stories in a big modern interior. They had filled the exhibition with lots of media and sound and film as well as big bits of machinery, beer barrels and malt seeds! I thought we'd go into the brewery itself but the popularity is so huge for Guinesss that they've made this exhibition instead. The had examples of their beer and the machinery used to make it and stuff. They had a huge area of wheat kernels, a waterfall and a section that had the old business books of teh original owner. There were tall hops plants as well. One of the best sections was all the marketing done over the decades. It was so cool I wanted some of the stuff that they had.
The original Guinness guy was so confident in his brewery that he signed a 9000 year lease! Now that's belief in your product.

At the end of the tour we went to the bar at the top of the building that had nearly 360 degree views over Dublin. We got a free Guinness each. The viwe itself was lovely as it overlooking the brewery as well as the city. We were running late for the ferry so Nathan skulled his, and a 3rd of mine. I drank a 3rd and started to feel a bit ill so we had to leave the last 3rd behind. Nathan was not impressed with this, but it had to be done.

We got to the ferry just in time and did the 9pm to 12.30am ferry which was much better than our 3am-7am fiasco a couple of days before. We sat up in teh ferry and wrote postcards and read and chilled out. We were prety darn tired when we docked at Wales. I had looked at accomodation in the town before we left, but we didn't have a map comprehensive enough for the town (which was called Holyhead) and the town itself was dead when we drove around it. There was a large hotel right near the docking-off point so we thought they'd get heaps of business to be ok to sleep there. Wrong! Wrong and wrong! The owner looked like an Indian version of Joe Pesci with a really bad combover. He tried to screw us on price but we naile dhim down to the cheapest price we saw in town when on the Internet (which still ended up being too much in my opinion). The room stank of smoke even though it was a no smoking room. I felt like I was drunk walking up the stairs they were so crooked and creaky and I thought I was going to fall through them. The carpet was lumpy and old. The room hadn't been vacumed in a decade with hair and dir ton the floor and Nate found a perfectly long cigarette ash on the floor next to his bed. We looked above the ash to the bedside table and it had about 10 cigarette burn marks on it from some dude putting hs fag down while he was in bed and letting it burn back on the wood of the table. The shared bathroom was an absolte hole and when we flipped the sheets over on teh bed they looked like they had a little bit of mould on them. I checked for bed bug blood spots but it seemed ok. Nate and I were screeching with laughter and at every catastrophe would point it out to the other person like a sight at an amusement park or something! We thought it was so funny and cracked up at each disaster we found. We ended up in bed late and exhausted. The bed itself was a nest of broken springs which we sank into two well dented holes!

We both slept kinda light - Nate had one ear open in case someone busted in and stole all our stuff. I woke up everytime I felt a slight itch, my brain screeching "lice! Lice! What if its lice!?".

Damn funny.