We're Busy Being Irish

On Wednesday morning we headed to the Guinness World Headquarters.

It is about a 10 minute bus ride from the City Centre. It is a very cool place! The tour is self guided and easy to follow. There are seven floors that explain how the beer is made, advertising, why Guinness is so dark, etc.

The seventh floor is called the Gravity Floor. It is where you get your free pint of Guinness (the kids and I had diet coke!).

The seventh floor is a large circular room that is all windows. We had a nice view of Dublin in all directions. This picture of Abbie has the Wicklow Mountains (to the south) in the background.

We also stopped by the Dublin City Hall building. They have a very informative exhibit on the history of Dublin.

I did not realize that Ireland was under the control of England from 1170 until 1922. That's a long time. Though very few people speak Gaelic anymore, all signs around the city (in the airport, on buses, street signs, etc) are in English and Irish Gaelic. Here is Natalie in the City Hall with the Irish flag.

Today we stayed in the apartment for most of the morning. There are toys in Trey's bedroom here and he has had a blast playing pretend with all of these action figures.

When we finally made it out the door we went to...

What a great day it was! It was around 42 degrees and a beautiful sunny day. There were very few people at the zoo so we meandered around at our own pace. They are doing quite a bit of work on several exhibits, so there were lots of construction people there. But we were able to see lots of the animals. This tiger paced by the glass divider many times while we were there.

Here is another tiger keeping his eye on Natalie.

We had a little snack at the zoo's snack bar and Abbie waited patiently with me for our order.

After the zoo, we went back to the City Centre and found a fabulous bookstore! We spent a long time and a ton of money in there. But our kids love to read so we won't gripe about spending money on books. And now have plenty of English books to bring back to Gdansk to keep us occupied for the next few months.

The trick is going to be packing them all in our carry on luggage to get them back to Gdansk!

We went to a traditional Irish pub for dinner. I had Irish stew made with Guinness beer, beef and mushrooms (yummy!). Myles had an Irish stew made with lamb and other veggies. I liked mine better, but his was still good. We've had a great couple of Irish days!