I'm a little (a lot) behind on blogging, so bear with me while I rapidly try to post everything that has happened in the last 3 days...
So, on our second day in Dublin we did a lot of pretty cool stuff. We started the day off super early by visiting the Kilmainham Gaol (the Irish spell "jail" that way). It was really fascinating. It was a gaol that was built a really long time ago (I think the late 1800s, but I learned this 3 days ago, so it's escaping me). A lot of famous Irish rebellers had been jailed there back in the day. A lot of executions had also taken place there which was a little bit creepy. The history of it was crazy including the fact that women, children, and men were treated equally in the gaol. So if you stole an apple and you were 7, you would receive the same sentence as a 40-year-old man who stole an apple. Another crazy fact was that during the Irish potato famine, people would purposely break the law so that they could be in gaol because the living conditions were better there than they were outside of gaol. The gaol probably doesn't sound that cool, but I will post pictures on Facebook as soon as I'm in London so you can get the full effect. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that my professor, Wolfgang, kept sending students into the gaol cells and then he would try to shut the door behind them. He is a crazy man.
After the gaol we caught taxis to a lecture with some Irish travellers. The travellers are basically a group of modern-day nomads who travel between all of the countries in Great Britain. However, in Ireland, they are discriminated against A LOT. It reminded me of how African-Americans were discriminated against prior to the Civil Rights movement. For instance, a statistic they showed us said that 97% of Irish people wouldn't accept a traveller into their family, 85% would not accept one as a friend, yet 85% of Irish people had never met a traveller. We have to do a final project about our time in Ireland and what we learned, and I plan on comparing the travellers' experiences to those of African-Americans in America. It should be pretty interesting...
Lastly, (but certainly not least!) we went to a tour of the Guinness Storehouse! It was awesome. They gave us a tour of the building and showed us how Guinness is brewed. Afterwards, we were able to learn how to pour "the perfect pint," and we all received certificates for doing so. After we had all had our pints, we ventured up to the 7th floor of the storehouse to the Gravity Bar. It was absolutely amazing. It was 360 degrees of glass and you could see the whole city. It was especially beautiful at night because the whole city was lit up. I also had a chance to visit the 2nd floor, which housed all the advertising Guinness has had, and watched a bunch of Guinness TV commercials dating all the way back to the 1950s. It was pretty cool.
That night, a bunch of us ventured farther into Dublin to go to the pubs. We decided to go to the tourist district, known as the Temple Bar area. Temple Bar is one of the most famous pubs in Dublin, and people from London are known to fly to Dublin for the weekend just to go out there. One of the really cool parts about the bar is that they have a section that is open-air with heaters, so you can sit outside at tables in the winter, but still be at the bar.
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