Dublin

Earlier this week from Monday to Wednesday I was the guest of the Abbey Theater in Dublin as part of their remembrance of the 60th anniversary of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.



Notice how the question wasn't even asked on whether the war is a good thing or not on this advertisement here in Ireland. Ireland is one of those countries that refused to take part in Iraq, and seems to have only cooperated with the Global War on Terror by sending a couple of token troops to Afghanistan, and by letting Shannon Airport be a logistical hub for transatlantic transportation. There is a reason for that, the writing is on the wall here quite literally:



I think at some point in their history Ireland learned the hard way that an occupation isn't a good thing, even if its done by people with the best intentions. Here are some pictures to some of the monuments to more remembered times in Irish history, known as the Great Famine:
A boat that took many Irish refugees to search of a better life in America

Some of those refugees

This is a pic of a Dublin corner, think Dublin will ever have a famine again?

The event was short but packed with intelligent questions. I was talking with an Irish Journalist named Fintan O'Toole.




Dublin itself was nice, I would have to say its the most American city in Europe I've been to yet and I'm not just saying that because its the last English speaking country I've been to in the past 18 months (though surprisingly Gaelic isn't as dead a language as I once thought it was).

Of course they don't make these here, and the bartender I asked hadn't even heard of this before. Here it is, the Irish Car Bomb, Belfast Auto Explosion, or my Dublin VBIED (no I don't like joking about bombs like McCain or something and of course I don't approve of whats going on in Belfast, but I didn't name the drink anyways,just changed it to Very Black Intoxicating Experience of Dublin):



Ahh, the Irish beer. I won't go so far as to say it tastes better than German beer, but I will say its smooth. For those of you visiting Ireland sometime soon I would definitely recommend the Temple Bar:



Or the Sin E (no its not a Sinn Fein bar as far as I know)


Not that there is any shortage of pubs to choose from.

More blog posts are coming soon. There still needs to be something posted on a tour though Italy that was done visiting some soldiers in the 173rd, and I will post about what is going on in Freiburg. A little birdie told me something else, much bigger than the baby stuff I'm blogging about now is going to be happening next week. We'll see soon.