dublin...ar potatoes

we arrive in the land of potatoes! we stayed with simon and louise. there were some issues associated with locating their apartment, including, what we found out later to be, an unrequired bus journey. here is a picture of the kimba reunion with the big pointy dublin spire in the background..

we were spoiled again with delicious home cooked food, which gave us plenty of stamina to complete the entire bus tour of dublin by foot.
under simon's advice, we snuck into the guiness factory and avoided the admission fee. the factory was interesting from both an alcoholic and process engineering technical aspect...here is alex in quality control..

...and me with some ye olde guiness propaganda. i sympathised with his surprised reaction to a guiness-napping seal.

we also briefly visited the old jamison whiskey factory...this is some sort of process equipment.we very much enjoyed relaxing in st stephen's green with the beautiful flowers. we also went to phoenix park to unsuccessfully find deer. simon and louise took us on both a daytime and night time tour of temple bar... here is THE temple bar...

the area turns into some kind of crazy british hens and bucks nights extravaganza at night. to the left is us at the apartment getting ready to head out. this photo of temple bar at night is appropriate for publication.. we also walked past this quite frightening sculpture everyday. it is of extraordinarily tall irish people starving when the potatoes ran out. they look similar to the 800 year old preserved crusader corpse we got to touch in st michans church in dublin. arh!

one evening we went for a drive to the marina at howth. here is a pretty sunset.. nice.