Bewleys Hotel, Dublin, Day 72. Guinness
Rolling into a taxi at noon, the seven of us (reiteration: me, Vinnie, Joseph, Mo, Briar, Anna, and Kat) took Dublin by storm today. I chatted with the taxi driver, who informed me of Trinity College passing on our right. Charles Dickens attended that university.
Once we were dropped off where the taxi driver had recommend for us to eat, O’Neill’s, we had lunch (ahembreakfasttooahem) and I had an incredible double-decker sandwich of chicken, bacon, barbeque sauce, tomatoes, caramelized onions, and steaming mushrooms. I took a picture of it with Vinnie’s camera. (Despite the lack of photos from here on out on the trip, I shall borrow friends’ pictures and eventually put them up on the blog.)
Our group split off into the three guys and the girls—plus me. The girls wanted to do the bus tour and so did I. We basically got a €16 lift around scenic Dublin and Anna, the art museum appreciator (well, leader of it), wanted to stop at the Modern Art museum. We did, but the experience went like this:
Empty. Windows of lonely exhibits—or was the building the centrepiece? The art appreciated by its exterior container? Three sculptures surrounded the building. Nothing. Silent winds.
We headed off into a nearby garden of a late 17th-early 18th century fashion. The crunch of gravel, the crunch of gravel, write it down, I wish I could, check pocket, pen…I ripped a sheet of paper this morning! Yes! This detail reminded me of my quick-minded idea this morning to have paper with me. I write the details of each day based on the fragments of a page.
The crunch of gravel into a silent garden, its design ancient but recently built of last century. Moss-stained statue to my right, a goddess? The fountain in the centre has folding swan wings—or tree canopy.
After a bitterly cold wait, we re-entered the tour bus (supposedly one comes every 10 minutes—we proved that wrong) and drove around a roundabout, my eyes fixed on the centre statue: the essence of this park, a Phoenix opening its wings and rising from its ashes of stone. The resurrection preserved.
The last gas-lit lamps of Europe lined the streets of Phoenix Park. We past back into the modern life, the tall business buildings made of geometric experiments of glass, a building sign embroidered: Na Cúluteanna Breithiúnais Coiriúla—Gaelic above English, a common thing in Dublin—‘The Criminal Courts of Justice’.
After the four of us got off at Trinity College and walked the grounds, Kat and I decided to join the guys at the Guinness Storehouse. After a wild goose chase of catching a bus, then waiting for the next one, we made it back on the green tour bus and headed to the founding brewery of all that is Guinness.
Holographic projections of silhouettes took up the walls around the Guinness ticket line. The silhouettes moved: people walked and horse carriages prodded on. Kat and I found out the guys had already left, but we took the tour for ourselves anyway. We split the cost of a €11 disposable camera at the gift shop and dived into the first of seven levels of the Guinness Storehouse. (As we walked in, we looked down at a manuscript preserved under glass: the founder’s 9000-year lease when he started the brewery.)
Four ingredients to Guinness: barely (grains upon grains piled in sand dune formations), hops (glass exhibiting the leafy growth), yeast (sun-golden images), and water (waterfall passing just over the walkway, the waters glittering with euro pennies). The factory insists that there is a fifth ingredient: its founder, Arthur Guinness (1725-1803).
Second level: the production. Kat and I watched a video of the making of a storage barrel, known as a cask, for twenty minutes—the worker begins with just evenly cut lengths of wood, trims to join them (measuring just with his eye), places a ring to encircle the wooden lines, drills a hole in one side, steams the cask for twenty, soon goes into curving the wood to fit on the second metal ring, adding the top (cutting based on the measurements of a large compass), and viola, you have a cask that takes a lot more work than one would think. Guinness had cask makers of this sort for a long time.
Quiz on the enchanted liquids and common knowledge: Kat and I both took it on this floor, 3.
Floor 4: advertisements through the centuries/decades. Floor 5: restaurant and how to cook Guinness in basically anything (okay, just a few things…but chocolate mousse cake?). Floor 6: the procedure for pouring from the tap. Towards the upper levels, Kat and I realized that the building’s opening in the middle was shaped like a pint of Guinness, the bottom smaller and the top with more (empty) room.
Then Floor 7: The Gravity Room. As is part of the tour, we each received a free pint of Guinness in a room with a 360 degree view of the whole of Dublin. At sunset, in our case. It was just incredible. The alchemy of Guinness brilliant.
After taking our last disposable camera picture (of 39) in front of a sign just outside the storehouse, we met up with the rest of our seven near the Millennium Spire (officially ‘Spire of Dublin’, by the way) and we ate a quick Subway meal. It’s a €6 Footlong here, if you were curious.
I couldn’t agree more with the consensus: it was to be a night-in, enchanting with more bonding and less taxi expenditures (generally €23 between the seven of us). I bonded with the taxi driver—his name is Vinnie Cowper, a likeable Irishman, and since I was in the front seat, I was able to ask if he knew where my last name came from. He narrowed down that ‘Tierney’ was not from the north, but from the east probably, yet that’s all he could figure. Still, it was good conversation. He complained of how fun it is to be a kid nowadays, but I immediately considered the less freedom involved in childhood. He agreed, recalling his mother yelling the names of his brothers and him to come home from the park at ten o’clock in the evening.
Once back, I snuck in 35 pages of reading Frankenstein while downstairs in the lobby, around the time I emailed that I was alive and had a taste of Dublin today (which is Guinness).
The nightly bonding was great. The seven of us played cards with genii bottles and I soon came to life in the spirit of the Energizer Bunny. I gave them good laughs with my silliness as the night went on.
No comments:
Post a Comment