Dubliners

We made it to Dublin today--hooray! Ellen and I wound up on the same flight as her original itinerary was changed. It worked out great because we were able to start things out together, beginning with the actual planeride.

We arrived at 6 am Dublin time and made it through customs without ceremony. We took the bus into the city. We were greeted with grey skies and rain.--what a magnificent change from my 9 months in the arid desert! We made it to the bed and breakfast by 7 am. Although we couldn't check in until 8 am, the night watchman gave us a key and let us go up to our room. We lay down for what we planned to be a short nap, only to wake up 7 hours later. It was fortunate we woke up when we did however as two Arab gentleman came charging into our room with a key 15 minutes later (it was also fortunate neither of us were in the shower at that moment as the clear shower door faces the entrance door; although I think that the uptight Arabs would have been more scarred by the experience than either Ellen or I would have been). The Arabs, highly distraught to find they'd walked into an occupied room but lacking the English skills to understand the situation when we explained it to them, quickly turned tail and fled. We followed them to the front desk 5 minutes later, where we explained our circumstances to the front deskman. All was quickly sorted although the Arabs were still confused and kept asking how this had happened. Even when Ellen saw one of them at the bathroom later in the evening, he was still trying to figure things out. We've nicknamed him Sherlock. The other, quieter one we've termed Watson.

With the few hours of daylight we had left (it was 4 pm by this time), we headed out to explore Dublin. We saw Trinity College and City Hall and Temple Bar, then made our way to the pub across the street for dinner at the end of the evening. We had dinners of soup and brown bread and fish and chips along with 2 pints of Guiness (Ellen and I were attempting to get two different kinds of beer but they were out of Harp and apparently Killian's ISN'T an Irish beer, leaving our knowledge of Irish alcohol exhausted). All in all, an excellent end to the first day of our adventure.