Eight days across Ireland: 1

I arrived in Ireland on September 19 exceptionally tired on a Ryan Air (the cheapest and most terrible airline known to man which actually was able to make me feel for the first time that the airline company was some sort of mortal enemy of mine who at any point was out to get me) flight from London groggy from the 4.5 hours of sleep I'd had beforehand but exceptionally excited to see Dublin.

After checking into our hostel Noah and I walked over to the General Post Office which I was keen to see because it was the main site of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin when Irish Republicans attempted (but eventually failed and were executed) to seize Dublin from the British.

From there we got fish and chips and ate on the stairs of a theatre that was currently showing an Oscar Wilde play before making our way to the Dublin Writers Museum. The museum provided a lovely and deep history of literary Dublin and had a very nice collection of antique books and playbills (though not as many as I was hoping). It was really enjoyable until a loud group of German schoolchildren arrived but I persisted and eventually found this very nice portrait of James Joyce hanging in a stairwell. 

I especially enjoyed all the sculptures, paintings, and other references to Joyce throughout Dublin because he figured prominently in A Moveable Feast by Hemingway which I was reading along the way (mostly on buses, trains and planes). After that we went on a walking tour that was led by a history Phd from Trinity College in Dublin that led us all over the city and discussed the rich history of Dublin and Ireland as a whole. It started at Trinity (which seemed to be having a huge student fair at the time) 

We progressed our way around the city (which had wonderfully beautiful streets)

South of Temple bar in an alley (or was it a road? I could never tell in Dublin) there was this cool mural of this guy. I've no idea of the significance but I really liked the colors. 

On the tour we also went past Dublin Castle which was the seat of British power in colonial Ireland. The picture below shows that at Dublin Castle Lady Justice was not blind. 

We also ended up in what I think was at some point Dublin's town hall which had this really neat mosaic of the city's seal. The burning castles on the seal while not particularly understood are possibly related to Dublin's trade with the city of Briton in England.

After the walking tour we got dinner at a carvery and had a glass of water because we were committed to making the first pint of a guinness a memorable experience. After a pleasant (but in my opinion not particularly excellent dinner of lamb and potatoes) we ventured to The Library Bar, which was a bar filled with victorian furniture and bookshelves on the second floor of a nice hotel in central Dublin. That first pint of Guinness was excellent and it really does taste better in Ireland and best in Dublin. After relaxing and enjoying our pints there we moved on to John Mulligans Pub back towards our hostel. There I watched some soccer highlights had another pint of Guinness and repeatedly almost knocked this ancient looking painting off of the wall. At that point I was too tired to do much more than drag myself into my bed in my hostel (which seemed to alarm the french girls who were in the 12 bunk bed room we were staying in) and sleep for a good many hours due to a combination of exhaustion and jet lag.