The Last of the Highs

The last two days of Dublin involved new friends, old friends, and lots of drinking. Day 4 started with meeting Miss Caitlin Crottie, Hannah's bff from high school. She happens to be studying in Dublin too, so we toured the Book of Kells with her. The Hamiltons like libraries, so this was right up our alley.



Next stop: the Jameson factory. Most people who go to Dublin make a big deal out of going to the Guinness factory, but in my opinion, they are missing the superior factory. The Jameson Whiskey factory has a more interesting tour, and it has a fun whiskey tasting at the end. Courtney and I had heard that we should volunteer if they asked at the beginning and so we did, but they only picked one of us. The lady handed a baton to Courtney and told her that she had to pick which one of us got to go up there. This was a real - neither of us actually wanted to taste whiskey in front of other people. But in the end, I lost out and had to pretend that I could stomach whiskey. I did okay for the first two types of whiskey, but Jack Daniels killed me:



The rest of the tour tasted much better and Courtney and I discovered that once you add gingerale to Jameson, it's delicious! Also at the Jameson factory, we met our new friend Pablo. Pablo is from Spain and he'd been speaking English for all of two weeks. You can't have many deep conversations with someone who speaks that little English, but he was a cheerful guy nonetheless:



After meeting our new friend, we met up with an old friend, Shaunak, from college. Shaunak is getting a masters in Paris this year, and he spent a couple of days with us in Dublin. Those days included lots of drinking; drunk Indian food; boxties; a beach; more drinking; lots o' wind; and worst of all, a trip to the airport to go home. :(





One more thing: 1 hundred million bonus points to anyone who knows (without cheating) why I was so totally pumped by this building...