Let me first point out that, living in the UK has taken a lot of the romance out of a trip to Ireland.  My first visit was a long sojourn to a far-off, exotic land where everything looked and sounded and tasted different.  This time, it was a 55-minute plane hop to a place that, truth be told, looks an awful lot like England.  It's like visiting Canada from Upstate NY (Quebec notwithstanding).

My initial impressions of Dublin are that it is a vibrant city, unselfconsciously gritty and cluttered, like an old friend who doesn't mind you coming over and catching him in his sweatshirt and boxer shorts.  There's a real "Take me as I am" attitude here that makes the obsessive neatness of the British seem stuffy by comparison. 

The walk from our hotel to city centre is manageable but the traffic is horrendous.  If you can ignore that, however, you could call it a pleasant stroll past a huge, grassy field where enormous squares of granite lay mysteriously on the ground, numerous pubs and even more numerous law offices, some ropy areas where yellowing movie posters and advertisements for Avril Lavigne's latest CD plaster the brickwork and--to signal your arrival at the heart of the city--the 'Hags with the Bags,' the famous statue of two women sitting on a park bench with their shopping bags at their feet.

It had been a long day, so we weren't up for a night of clubbing.  We simply had a lovely, traditional dinner at a nice restaurant in the Temple Bar area, then went in search of a neighborhood pub.  We found one not far from our hotel and, although we felt more like falling into bed, we went in for the obligatory pint. 

The place was as homey as you could get--just a few old guys sitting at the bar.  We took a table and sampled the Guinness.  Just as I remembered--in Ireland, the Guinness tastes better, it's smoother, creamier and without the bitter edge you often get in the non-Irish portion of the world.  A trip to the Guinness Factory is on the itinerary so I'm making it my quest to find out why.

That was all we had time for.  With the pint only partially gone, I committed the absolute sacrilege and left it unfinished.  We arrived at the hotel around the time most people were preparing for the evening's festivities and fell into bed for some much-needed rest.