Our hotel was just a few minutes walk to Trinity College, which was nice. I really enjoyed the tour of the Old Library and the Book of Kells Experience. They are in the process of making the library more fire resistant and had cleared out most of the books. They had videos explaining the process a company used to protect and store them in about 30,000 boxes. If a student wants to check out one of the books, the make a request and the company finds it within the warehouse’s boxes. Sounds like a super fun project, haha!
And I had never bothered learning about the Book of Kells, even though I had heard about it before (Jeremy & Marissa had done the tour before.) Who knew such an “experience” could revolve around a single book, but it really was fascinating. There is so much significance hidden in all the artwork within the book that I could have never figured out on my own. Thankfully, our audio guide and the written descriptions did a nice job of pointing out some highlights. I also enjoyed watching the videos showing how the book was made, from the animal skin pages, to the book binding and the artwork. Definitely a tour worth taking, in my opinion.
It took about 15 minutes to walk to the Guinness Storehouse. Randy snapped a few pics of sights along the way. We had time to kill before the tour, so we grabbed a bite to eat at the Temporary Cafe around the corner from the storehouse.
The Guinness Storehouse was interesting enough, even for someone who isn’t interested in drinking beer. My favorite part was watching the waterfall graphics as seen in the video below. They made words and pictures by starting and stopping the water falling — super creative! I also enjoyed sitting down in the theater room to watch the Guinness commercials that have run throughout the years. Mostly because it was so nice to be able to sit down, haha, but some of the commercials were cute, too. After the tour, we went to the top floor of the building where the bar was, to get our free pint of beer. Randy didn’t want mine, so we ended up giving my voucher away to a group of guys who seemed like they’d enjoy and extra pint.
We went back to the room after the tour and veg’d! Randy eventually ordered a pizza from the hotel restaurant, went downstairs to pick it up and brought it back to the room to eat. We’re trying to rest up a bit to prepare for Italy sightseeing next week!
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