Speaking of black gold our first touristy activity for the weekend was a tour of the Guinness Brewery Storehouse!

Like most beers the raw ingredients of Guinness are barley, hops, water, and yeast. The colour and flavour of Guinness is due to a portion of the barley being roasted for two and a half hours prior to the mashing process, whereby the barley is combined (mashed) with water and then heated. There's a lot of info on the brewing process of beer here.

After a quick nosey around the Guinness 'museum', it was up to the bar!

That's all the evidence I need ;)

Next stop was Kilmainham Gaol (prison). It was built in the late 18th century and closed down as a jail in 1924. It looks straight out of Prison Break and The Shawshank Redemption.

Looks cosy. The prison has a pretty interesting history, and held a lot of famous people who fought for Irish independence from the bloody Brits. The prison was also no stranger to children who would sometimes spend a number of days here for petty theft. For many years the prison suffered from major overcrowding, and many adult prisoners were shipped off to Australia during the first half of the 19th century (as the Aussies should well know). As they do, some of the prisoners smuggled in this and that, and one female prisoner, Grace Gifford-Plunkett (famous for her part in the Irish civil war in 1922/23), got her hands on some paints and set about painting a mural of a Madonna. Six years before her own incarceration, Grace married Joseph Plunkett while he was on death row in Kilmainham, just three hours before he was executed by firing squad out the back, but that's a whole other story in itself. The shot in the middle is the word 'Dunmore' inscribed above a cell door; Dunmore being a small Irish town of which this prisoner was obviously a resident.

There may well be a shot of me in this predicament one day on this site after taking a photo I shouldn't have ;)

After leaving the prison it was getting pretty dark up there, and five minutes later we got stuck in a torrential Irish downpour that stuck around for the rest of the day and drenched us hehe.

If there's one thing Dublin does well, it's putting on a bloody great show at night! There's definitely no shortage of bars and clubs of all types to enjoy, and if you can find a live Irish band or two then even better. Someone had just poured detergent or bubble bath or something in this fountain, and the bubbles were spreading fast hahaha! There's a fountain back home not far from my university that would always be overflowing with bubbles around about the holidays hehe!

Dublin's famous Temple Bar is definitely the tourists' favourite place to be when the sun goes down. Temple Bar is an area just south of the river full of bars, clubs, and restaurants (and dodgy foreigners propositioning any passing women). For me it epitomises what Dublin is at night - thousands of pissed-up people dancing around in the street (sometimes for no apparent reason) and having a blast. I didn't see any fighting, I didn't hear any cops, and maybe it just happened to be a quiet weekend but like I said the locals are a friendly mob and it was a really awesome atmosphere to be in! I was told there are two reasons why Irish drink: because they're thirsty, and because they're not.

Fire poi!

This dude with the violin was bloody hilarious and I wish I could've taken a video of him. Any way you could think to play a violin, he was doing it and fully getting into it! At one point he went up to random girl walking past, wrapped his arms around her and carried on playing the violin around her hahaha awesome!

Jen and I ventured into most all of the bars in Temple Bar to see what was happening, specifically looking for some of the live Irish music I'd been hearing about. It took a little bit of looking but we found some, and it was good :)

By the following evening those bubbles had gotten completely out of control. Half the street was full of them, kids were playing in them, and the fountain jets were just pissing them out hahaha!

From one booze factory to another, we also did a tour of the Jameson Whiskey Distillery.

As with the Guinness tour we were told all about the raw ingredients and brewing process, and it was all very similar except Whiskey has no hops obviously, whiskey is distilled, and aged for around 12 years in wooden casks (or at least Jameson whiskey is). That dude in the middle is Bob. This poor bastard's job back in the day was to lug 100kg sacks (yup, 100kgs) of barley upstairs into the store (which was five storeys high). The cat in that shot is about 200 years old hehe. His job was to kill mice in the grain store, and after 23 years of loyal service the old timer passed on and they had him stuffed!

As I mentioned, whiskey is distilled a number of times to separate the alcohol from the fermented liquid that is the result of the mashing process, and then left to mature in casks for a number of years. There's a good website here that explains the making of Irish whiskey if any of you alcoholics are interested :)

After a small piss...

Oooo yeah, that's gonna put hair in places I didn't know possible ;)