Getting my yellow fever shot was almost too easy. After going on a wild goose chase through clinics and offices in Athens, walking to the second story of the "Tropical Medical Bureau" 1.3 km from my hotel was almost a joke.
I then boarded the hop-on, hop-off bus with the intention of completing the tour I hopped off of yesterday and also visiting the National Museum. After 3 months full of museum visits, you think I'd know better than to try to go to a museum on a Monday... I ended up at the zoo instead, though, so no complaints there :)
Irish police officers have STDs?
Garda
Wellington Monument, Phoenix Park
President's House, Phoenix Park
Sumatran Tiger, Dublin Zoo
Baby Giraffe, Dublin Zoo
This afternoon I finally met my tour group I'll be traveling with for the next 6 days. I'm not the youngest person! There's a dad with an 8-year old(ish) son and a few other families with younger children. I think I'm the only person traveling alone, though. We took a guided tour of the city, which repeated some of the stuff I had already done on the hop-on, hop-off tour, but I was able to hear better so I still enjoyed it. We got off and had a tour of the Dublin Castle as well. It is by no means a castle, but the president is inaugurated in the St. Patrick's Room of the "castle." The bus also took us down to the port of Dublin and the newer, "Financial District" of the city.
Famine
After a 3 hour tour (a 3 hour tour) I had a nice nap and then met up with the group again for a "welcome drink" where I met two women from Scotland and a couple from Sweden. We then went to dinner and a show in the hotel, where I sat with an Australian couple from Victoria (outside Melbourne), a mother-daughter pair from Queensland (also Australia), and a family from Oregon. Dinner was pretty good--vegetable soup, chicken, potatoes and mixed veggies on a portobello mushroom, followed by a "dark chocolate caramel cube" for dessert. Plus two glasses of red wine and an Irish music/dance performance...I'd say it was a pretty solid evening.
It's blurry because their legs really do move that fast...
Irish Dancing
The Count
Glasses of wine drinken: 153
Irish castles toured: 1
Irish cities visited: 1
Photos taken: 5608
Lesson of the Day
There are two stories behind the colorful Georgian doors (like the maize and blue ones I found yesterday):
1. After a long night of drinking a man once woke up in the wrong apartment, in the wrong bed, with the wrong wife...so color-coding the doors made it clear which house belong to who.
2. After Queen Victoria died, Irish people were told to paint their doors black in mourning. Fact of the matter is, most of the doors were likely already black. So the Irish, being the David Weiss' of Europe, painted their doors in all sorts of colors.
Seeing as I spotted Michigan neighbors yesterday, it was only proper that I came across this set today:
Wahoowa
Photo of the Day
This guy was huge:
Yawning Hippo, Dublin Zoo
Tomorrow
We have an early start (bags ready at 6:45, on the bus at 8AM) and a very long day of traveling through the country-side, visiting the Blarney Castle (kissing the stone), much more and ending in Killarney for the evening.
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