5/2/2008 8:30pm IST

One of the things I mentioned in my previous post was that sunlight stays out much later in the evening. Well, that happens on the flip side as well, since it was damn sunny at 6am! I wasn’t expecting Ireland to be sunny at all, so it was a nice surprise to have our first 2 days in Ireland filled with sunshine.

We left the hotel around 9am and caught the Dublin Bus City Tour which is a tour that goes around the city on an open-top double decker bus. You can hop on & hop off at any of their 23 stops which stop at the main Dublin attractions (15 euros/ea and the ticket is good for 24 hours).

Our first stop was at the Guinness Storehouse, home to Guinness beer. They have a self-guided tour which we went on (13 euros/ea).

This way

I’m not a big beer fan, and in fact haven’t had a Guinness since probably my mid-twenties, but it was still an interesting tour on how the black stuff is made. The tour ends at the top of the storehouse at the Gravity Bar, where you get a free pint of Guinness as part of your tour and take in the sights of Dublin in the near 360 degree view from the bar. Free Guinness, I could not deny.

We hopped back on the bus and headed towards Trinity College (Ireland’s oldest university) to meet up with the S.O.’s ex-coworker who retired maybe a year ago and moved back to Ireland. We ate at the nearby Avoca Cafe.

Afterwards, we went back to Trinity College to see the ornate Book of Kells, which contains the 4 Gospels of the New Testament in Latin transcribed by Celtic monks circa 800 A.D. We also saw the 2 story high main chamber in the Old Library, known as the Long Room, which was directly upstairs from the Book of Kells exhibit.

We hopped back on the City Tour bus, heading towards Kilmainham Gaol (pronounced like “jail”), but didn’t realize that it closed early. We’ll have to hit the gaol on our last day in Ireland when we return to Dublin.

Since being denied at the gaol, we head to the ritzy Grafton Street, which we were told is the 5th most expensive retail street in the world (Fifth Ave. in NYC being the most expensive and the Champs-Élysées in Paris the most expensive in Europe).

We didn’t but anything other than coffee and tea at Bewley’s Oriental Cafe. By the time we finished, it was near dinner time so we consulted our Rick Steve’s guidebook and decided to check out a vegetarian restaurant called Cornucopia which was just off Grafton St. We’re glad we did, and we rolled ourselves back to the hotel after being stuffed with vegetables (we love vegetarian restaurants like Greens and Ubuntu in the SF Bay Area).

That’s all for Dublin (for now). Tomorrow, we head down the coast towards Cork.