Originally, our plan for today was to take one of those tourist "hop on/hop off" buses around Dublin to see the city, but Kate decided she would rather walk, because nothing we wanted to see was too far away.
So we crossed the street to Trinity College and arrived just as they were opening the doors to the "Book of Kells" exhibit. First, I want to say the campus is so cool, not very big, and it has some really old buildings. The school was established in 1592.
The exhibit of the Book of Kells (which dates back to the 9th century) was very good with enlarged photos of the illustrations and text from the actual book (since it is a glass case). For more information, check out this link: http://www.tcd.ie/about/trinity/bookofkells/. The school has had this book in their possession since the 1600s. Upon leaving the exhibit, the visitor is led to their library of old books. This library is absolutely beautiful and brought to mind the library at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies.
Then we proceeded a little further to Grafton Street which is a pedestrian mall. We walked past all the stores down to the end of the area to St. Stephen's Green where there is an indoor mall.
We left the mall and just started strolling around, turning down one pedestrian mall after another and...lo and behold in front of us we saw the Louis Vuitton store. I am convinced I could find that store in any city without looking for it ;-). There was also an Hermes store and a Chanel store. We didn't bother entering any of those though.
We got a bit of lunch and set out for the Guinness brewery. That walk was a little longer than we thought, but once we were on our way, we decided to stick it out. It's a good tour, but of course what everyone looks forward to, is the end when your ticket stub allows you a free pint of Guinness in the circular bar at the top, which looks out over the city. (the picture is of Guinness settling before he tops it off)
We then walked back to the hotel to let our feet rest up for the pub crawl.
This was billed as a Musical Pub Crawl. Two musicians took us to two pubs where they entertained us with Irish folk music. They explained a lot of the customs of Irish singing and songwriting. This was different from the other night in that these musicians only sing traditional folk songs. It was excellent and I would definitely recommend it.
Tomorrow we fly home. We are both looking forward to being back in the USA.
After all that, not one lost item of consequence (I left my shampoo somewhere). No incidents with crime. We never got lost. Most people in most of the places we visited were pretty nice, especially in Ireland. There was beauty to be found in every place we visited.
