Dublin is the Boston of Europe.

Though, um, perhaps the reverse is more accurate, as least for the Irish parts.

Anyway, Dublin was pretty cool, tho likely not my favorite city, and I wanted to write some impressions. The first thing is how much like Boston is really is. First, you can walk across basically the whole city in 25-30 min. Second, the history of the city itself is very similar. It focuses on an event called the 1916 Easter Rising, where on Easter Monday, the citizens rebelled against the rule of the English, and when captured, the leaders were summarily executed by firing squad. Three years after this event, in 1919, began the Irish War of Independence. So if you combined the Boston Tea Party and Boston Massacre into one event, you have roughly Dublin, but 140-odd years earlier. Oh, and for the third thing, there are obviously a lot of Irish people, and despite this being obvious, it leads certain parts of Boston to have the same type of Georgian architecture you see everywhere in Dublin.

Let's see, what did I do there? I went to the Guinness brewery, and thought only two words. "Willy Wonka." Of course, those were closely followed by "Pawtucket Pat," which is perhaps more accurate. It was awesome. I started expecting to drink an experimental pint and start walking through walls or something. By the fourteenth experiemental pint, I was definitely flying at least. Thank you folks, I'll be here all week. The coolest part of the brewery was defintiely the exhibits in teh art and advertising through the ages. Guinness certainly has had some memorable ads, and I particularly like the Toucan ones. They've also had some rather, um, offensive ones through the ages. I'll post some of the pics when I have my camera, soon.

Other sights: Kilmainham Gaol (Jail) - This is a jail that is important in the history for two reasons. 1) When constructed, each cell only was designed for one person, and then immediately after construction, it was 3-4 per. Whoops. Anyway, during the famine in the 1840's, food became scarce some people stole or begged and the jail bceame more crowded, and then they made begging illegal. So yeah... But the truly horrible thing was that people were trying to get caught for petty crimes because conditions in the jail were better, even after they tried to reduce rations to limit that. 2) The leaders of the Easter Rising were held then executed here.

I also did a musical pub crawl. We didn't crawl so much, and got no drinks for our 10€. But we learned all about traditional Irish music and the role it plays in the culture and heard some played (the fiddle guy was really good, too). I love Irish music, and really want to go buy a Dropkick Murphys CD now.

Wow, this post is getting long - I'm gonna have to post more frequently so this doesn't happen. (I'm also two cities past Dublin already, so that's another reason). Anyway, there was this gorgeous park in Dublin called St. Stephen's Green (Dublin also has a park 3x the size of Central Park, which is impressive), and the last two days I was in Dublin it was beyond beautiful out, so I went and just sat and read. It was awesome. Funniest part about those trips was that probably near 75% of all the people were couples cuddling, lying on each other, or just flat out making out. It was equal parts sweet and kinda gross. The 300lb per person couple that plopped down right in front of me and startig going at it was definitely the latter. But it really seems they get all of two or so nice days a year, and they all wanted to take advantage. I guess I was lucky.

Anyway, that was Dublin. I'll hopefully put some pics up soon. I have oh, a million or so. Done with Florence and I'm in Rome now. Will post about Florence soon. Just one thing: òàù+èì< (no shift key) and !"£*éPç°§> (shift key) and ][#@€ (alt gr). Stupid Italian keyboards need a third button option and make my life difficult. Ah, well.