The Queen and I: Guinness, Gays, and a One Really Long Day

Disclaimer: Sorry this took so long to get started, It's been crazy. I'll do my best to stay caught up.

For the purpose of this blog I’ll refer to this as one day, but it was really 2 days and it felt like about 3 days.

We left for LAX at 4:45 AM on Friday, June 28^th. We got through security pretty fast and had about an hour in the terminal before our 8 AM JetBlue flight boarded for Boston.

There was an off duty JetBlue employee sitting across the aisle from us and he had a dog in a carry on that he kept under the seat in front of him.

The flight was about 5.5 hours so we had plenty of time to kill. We bought some JetBlue neck pillows that were really comfortable. Then I made mine into a hat.

Mom and I played the game of life on my phone. Then we watched some TV on the JetBlue entertainment system.

Nebraska wasn’t all that interesting out the window.

Mom wasn’t impressed.

And dad slept as we flew over heaven (That’s Iowa for those of you that don’t live your life through quotes from Field of Dreams.)

Then we flew over the Great Lakes and finally over Boston on our way into Logan Airport. There was a family with two little kids in front of us. The baby cried the whole time. I thought the baby crying on planes thing was just a made up punch line for bad jokes.

Now, I should have mentioned that our flight left LAX about 40 minutes late because they had not loaded cargo weight right. Our flight to Dublin was to leave 1 hour and 50 minutes after our flight from LAX. So we knew we had to hurry. The JetBlue fight attendant told us that the worker at the desk at the gate could call to the Aer Lingus gate and tell them that we were on our way. After it took us 10 minutes to get off the plane, the worker at the desk was a complete jerk and told me “it wasn’t his problem.” Turns out we had to go out of security and to another terminal 10 minutes away. We ran and ended up pushing through security. Mom and I both had water bottles that we forgot about because we didn’t know we had to go through security again. So of course, we both got our bags searched, which took even more time.

Long story short, we made it onto the Aer Lingus flight with a few minutes to spare, but we weren’t able to get any food or water in the airport like we had planned. Fortunately, I had packed some snacks that held us over until dinner.

Mom was pretty tired.

On the Aer Lingus flight, we watched The Dictator on my computer. When the flight attendants gave us drinks they gave the three of us a big bottle of water to split which was much appreciated after running through the airport.

Our dinner on the flight was a choice of beef brisket with mashed potatoes and pees or four cheese lasagna. I had the beef brisket and mom and dad both had the lasagna.

The dinner also included a piece of cheese, a dinner roll, and a brownie. For all the crap untalented comedians give to airplane food, it wasn’t that bad. They also brought us coffee and tea after a little while.

After dinner we all tried to get a little bit of sleep. Those neck pillows really came in handy, but I still only got about an hour of sleep. An hour before we landed they gave us some orange juice.

When they came through to pick up trash, I got one of my first experiences with funny Irish words and sayings. My two favorites were “rubbish” and “you’re very welcome.” “You’re very welcome was not like “Thank You/You’re Welcome.” It was like “You’re very Welcome to Dublin” or “You’re all very welcome to the Guiness Storehouse (I’m getting there).

When we landed at 5 am, the Dublin Airport was completely empty. After we got our luggage, we went through customs and had our passports stamped. It was very fast and they just asked when we were leaving Ireland and then they stamped them.

There were a lot of posters and signs around the airport for “The Gathering,” which it sounded like was a promotional thing to increase tourism among people of Irish heritage.

We took a taxi to our hotel, which was across the street from the John Jameson Whiskey Distillery.

Fortunately, we were able to check in to the hotel even though it was still only about 6 am. We dropped our bags off in our room and cleaned up a bit.

It was about 20 hours since we had left our house, but instead of sleeping we went out to explore Dublin. When we first started walking around 8:30, most places were not open. We crossed the Leffy River (which we basically had to do anytime we went anywhere) and walked for a bit. Eventually we found a bakery that was just opening. I had scrambled eggs and toast with a tomato relish that sort of tasted like ketchup. Mom had the same thing. Dad had one with sausages, eggs, toast, and some other things that I don’t remember. I had tea and they both had coffee.

Then we walked to the Guinness Storehouse, which was about 10 blocks away. On the way, we noticed that there was a lot of trash and graffiti around Dublin. One thing I saw that stuck out was the abundance of American beer (mainly Budweiser) littering the streets. I did my best to document that and so if you see a bunch of pictures of empty beer cans and bottles, you’ll know why. Apparently they do not give money back for recycling in Europe.

When we got to Guinness we walked through a maze of the buildings and took our picture at St. James Gate, which is the famous name of the location of the storehouse. The storehouse itself opened about 3 minutes after we got there (I think it was 10 am).

It was a self-guided tour through 7 floors. It began with an introduction from a guide. As I had just told my parents because I read about it the week before, the guide told us that we were standing in the world’s largest pint glass. Yes, I thought the world’s largest “pint glass” would be 1 pint too. Instead, it was 7 floors and if it was filled, it would hold 14.3 million pints of Guinness.

We got to learn about the ingredients, advertising, and making of the barrels. We also learned that some yeast is always taken from one batch to the next so every batch of Guinness is, in a way, connected to the first batch.

The top floor was called the gravity bar and it was a 360 degree view of Dublin. With our tour ticket, we got a complimentary Guinness Stout or a soft drink. Dad of course got the Guinness because it’s his favorite beer. I too had a Guinness, taking advantage of the 18 year old drinking age (Yes they checked). For the record, I loved the Guinness, but it was the only alcohol that I drank in Ireland, and so far in the entire trip. Mom didn’t want a beer because she doesn’t like beer and because it was still not even noon (not yet 2am California time).

After the storehouse (and maybe partly because of the beer), we were extremely tired. We had only slept about 2-3 hours over that last day and the time change made everything worse. We did not have much choice and basically needed to go back to the hotel for a short nap. Despite setting alarms, we ended up napping for almost 5 hours.

Around 6 pm, we left the hotel and walked back across the bridge to find a place to eat dinner in the Temple Bar area. We saw some American chains and others that looked like imitations.

Johnny Rocket's cousin?

hmmm...Panda...

Papa Johns is an ATO

Then we saw a gathering of drunk young people, which dad referred to as “some kind of party.” I guess he was kind of right, but it was actually Dublin’s Gay Pride festival.

There were also a lot of drunk adults hanging by the pubs.

We ended up going into one of the pubs and had dinner upstairs where the bartender came to our table and acted as our waiter. I had a hamburger, dad had stew, and mom had fish and chips.

The bartender/waiter also explained what white and black puddings were after we had seen them multiple times throughout the day. Basically white pudding is a bunch of pig guts. Black pudding is the same thing but they color it using pig blood. Good luck eating ever again.

After dinner we walked through the hoards of gay pride celebrators back down and across the river to our hotel and went to sleep.

More pictures: