Ireland: Everything you desIRELAND.

Ireland: Everything you desIRELAND. That should be the axiom displayed on walls and billboards everywhere. Ireland – a country that...sure...it had is foibles, like crappy bus drivers, but aside from those unfortunate scum of the earth, it is a country that will always share a special place in my heart. Like the movie Freddy Got Fingered, or Pokémon.

When we awoke in our homely and well furnished Castle hotel room, the sun was shining and the weather was mildly chilly. We decided to walk into town to check out the Guinness factory and do a tour there. The tour was intriguing – we learned about all the stuff that goes into Guinness and we learned of a secret ‘fifth ingredient’ that contributes to the refreshing and revitalising flavour you taste in each pint of Guinness today. After processing all of this information, it was time to head up to the bar at the top of factory and kill our brain cells once more with a cold pint of Ireland’s pride and joy, on the house. From there we got a view of Dublin for what it really was – a large country town. It seemed like a quaint, family friendly neighbourhood, and this was further supported by the presence of bright blue neon lights in the toilets of McDonalds, where we stopped for lunch.

After walking around the town for a while, we decided to head back home and get ready for a night on the town. I found a highly regarded place called The Barcode, which we thought was a pub and restaurant style. However, we started to go in and were told that the place didn’t open until 10pm. Wondering what the hell kind of bar opens at 10pm! Anyway, we grabbed a couple o’ pints at a pub around the corner until it opened 3 hours later. We were watching some Rugby Union match between Munster and Whothehellknows. Then we made our way to the Barcode which, hands down, beats every single nightclub in Brisbane. Let’s see how they stack up:

Nightclub Feature	Brisbane Nightclub	Barcode Nightclub - Dublin
No overly aggressive, self important bouncers or anal door bitches outside preventing anyone coming in.	X	√
Cheap drinks on Weekend evenings all night	X	√
More females than males	X	√
People that don’t look like Sarah Jessica Parker	X	√
A premier nightclub without an entry fee	X	√

In addition to all of these things, there was an arcade room above the dancefloor where you could test your skill at picking up plush toys or racing one another in a game of Daytona. In addition to this, we were heckled by quite a few Irish people – one took a particular shine to calling us ‘skip’ and bouncing around like a Kangaroo, which I regrettably informed him that it offended me because my pet ‘roo died recently because of a Dingo attack. Plus, he also jokingly said some other stuff to us, which we didn’t understand at all, so we just waited for him to start laughing and then we laughed along with him.

It seemed that we were ‘Dublin’ in all kinds of things in the Republic of Ireland!