There are good ships and there are wood ships, but the best ships are friendships

(I didn't take this one)

My friend Maggie is Irish, and has a ton of family still living in the country, of course she doesnt really know them, but family is family and you gotta help one another out. Pay it forward and whatnot. Family is the reason we ventured into town yesterday. Maggie had a cousin of some sort visiting Dublin for the day with a friend (from Chicago, not Ireland) and it was requested that she show her around a bit. Now this is all well and good, but to be real we only know like two neighborhoods and a handful of street names. Oh well, we headed down and met them at the spire. Have I mentioned the spire? It's just this giant spike in the middle of Dublin, strange.

These things were awesome

With cameras in hand we deemed the day a photo safari and vowed to take many more pictures than we had on our previous jaunts into town. We stumbled upon something called Trad Festival which we came to find out was a festival to celebrate traditional Irish music and art. We got to see some Irish dancing before popping into a cafe for a snack and a pint, only to find they had no guinness!! No guinness? Is that even allowed? After that we wandered the temple bar area a bit, we ran into these people dressed as giant puppets. I took a photo of the one in the dress and then as I was walking away the other guy came up and wrapped his arms around me. I must have jumped three feet off the ground. They spoke in these ridiculous voices and he said "I saw you taking pictures of my wife!" Hilarious. (They sound the hand creatures in the movie Labyrinth). After awhile her cousin was tired so we helped them back to their hotel. Unsure of what to do with the rest of the day ahead, we popped into a pub to mull it over with a pint, Guinness this time.

Stepped into the neighborhood's namesake, Temple Bar itself. We squeezed our way in through the already crowded bar, 5:45 on a Sunday, I guess the Irish do know how to party. After an hour of foot tapping, hand clapping, beer sloshing music the band was done and we decided to venture out to another pub. On our way out the bar, a woman handed us flyers, we almost didn't grab them but thank goodness we did because they were for a free half pint of Guinness at a neighboring pub! Funnily enough, the same band from earlier was now playing at this pub. We got a few head nods that said they knew we were at Temple Bar and we felt a little like their groupies. At one point one of the band members came up and grabbed Maggie for some Irish dancing. It was adorable and hilarious.

There was this mysterious door that people kept going into, we finally decided to see what all the fuss was about, and it turned out to be a show of some band doing indie rock covers, we went to the bar to order a drink but then some guy asked to see our stamps, which we clearly didn't have. How he knew we didn't have any is just as mysterious as that door. We were asked to leave out the back exit which led us into an alley.

Where we found a jazz bar, unfortunately the music had just ended but we met this old irishman who made us promise to come back and check it out next Sunday. After that we made our way to another bar, where we were bought these shots called snowglobes, there were about five different types of liquor in it, including one with little gold flakes. Really pretty, even more delicious. After that we ran into some guys we sort of knew, and then took a bus home, made spaghetti and watched music videos with Seetha and Ali.

You can click on this link to view my album of the days photos on Facebook.