Some notes from Dublin:

The Irish hate the British. Mention anything about England to a Dublin cab driver, and you get a ten-minute rant on how the British spent somewhere between 700 and 10,000 years pushing Irish farmers off their land, raping Irish women, and eating Irish babies for afternoon tea.

Dublin is a national capital. The only previous national capitals I'd visited are Washington, London, Paris, and Beijing, all of which are much bigger, have less friendly people, and have better public transportation (yes, even Beijing) than Dublin. So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the American embassy was less than half a mile up the road from our hotel. And you can perhaps imagine my more than slight anxiety as I walked to dinner on Thursday night alongside a rather large protest headed towards said embassy.

There is no better way to spend an evening than sitting in a pub listening to traditional Irish music played by a random group of people who are there not for money or an audience but simply because they love the music and love playing it. Also it helps if one of the fiddlers is a cute girl around the age of 23.

The Bailey's really does taste better there. I brought home a liter and a half. Sadly, I didn't try any Guinness.

1200-year-old books are really fucking impressive.

The Choir of St. Patrick's Cathedral is rather mediocre, a sad decline from the days when it premiered Handel's Messiah. Perhaps that is why the only people in attendance at a Thursday evensong were me and my mom and a busload of Eastern European high school kids. Or perhaps it's because the Anglican church service is listless and perfunctory.

Bill Bryson is a really funny writer.