Ten things you didn’t know about Dublin

by Grant Martin on

Visiting any city for the first time is an exercise in setting expectations. You can only read so much about the culture, nightlife and food in a guidebook before you need to experience the locals first hand, order a pint of Guinness or eat shepherd’s pie and really visit a destination. Setting foot out into the city streets, you begin to compare your first hand experiences against everything that you thought you knew about a destination. In some facets, you’re surprised and impressed by the difference; in others, you’re underwhelmed.

Taking advantage of some weekend work in the Emerald Isle, I recently spent some time in the capital city for my first trip to Ireland. I was moved most by the ten things below:

  • You’re never going to want to eat Shepherd’s Pie at your local Irish pub again. No, Dublin isn’t known for its pinky-up food culture, but the things that they get right they really get right.
  • The city revolves around drinking. To that end, bar crawling in Dublin can be performed quite literally. One only needs to mosey down two or three store fronts before he or she discovers another pub almost identical to the one that was just left. It’s disorienting enough having a bar on all four corners of every intersection in the downtown area – now try doing it with 17 pints of Smithwicks in your stomach. Currently, the drinking problem has become so profound that there is a massive public effort to curb binge drinking, the majority of which is found in telly and bus ads trying to guilt people out of overindulging.
  • There isn’t really that much to see besides the 976,000 bars. Yes, Dublin has a couple of excellent museums, Trinity College, Phoenix Park and the Guinness factory (does that even count?), but compared to some of the heavy hitters in the EU like Rome or Paris, Dublin’s “cultural” fodder is a bit anemic — which isn’t to say that the city isn’t worth visiting, either. I’m personally a bar and cafe sort of person, so I found the area quite charming.
  • Temple Bar is not an enormous tourist trap. It’s a tourist trap, yes, but in the same sense that Times Square is. Just like everyday New Yorkers visit 42nd street, real Irish can be found in the district just south of the river, you can get a good shepherd’s pie and there is plenty of cultural flavor in the area. Make sure you stop by at least once during your stay.
  • Phoenix park is the largest city park in all of Europe. Just Northwest of the hailed Temple Bar, you can walk around Phoenix for an hour and barely scrape the surface of the massive plot. Much of the perfectly tailored grass is on limits, so you can feel free to walk awry from the winding paths, take your shoes off and really absorb the fertilizer into your bare feet. Contrast this to the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, where hundreds of locals pull up chairs to the edge of the path just to watch the grass silently sit there undisturbed.
  • Skyscrapers are nonexistent downtown. In fact, the tallest series of buildings around town happen to be in the network of Guinness buildings. Which leads us to:
  • Guinness sponsors everything. In addition to their near omnipresence in every pub (and hence on every corner in the city,) the beer company also has independent retail stores where you can buy branded underwear and sheets, sponsors athletic teams and appears to be the impetus behind 9 out of 10 business deals in the country.
  • Shamrocks, Leprechauns and pots of gold are all out. We think that Guinness bought the patent on each of these ideas and swallowed them into the beer empire.
  • It’s going to rain. Really. They don’t call it the Emerald Isle because it’s known for arid plains and rolling deserts. It rains here like the heavens just broke up with their long term girlfriend. A good rule of thumb is to take any precipitation forecast you saw on the news and multiply it by four.
  • Riverdance is ridiculous. But it does happen. And people eat it up like pigeons fighting for popcorn. Several of the more touristy hotels even offer the spectacle nightly, where hundreds of tourists amass during the evening hours to watch a few poor sots dance their hearts out and spin in circles. If you’re really interested in finding something of this sort in Dublin, just follow the mess of fanny packs at around 9PM and you’ll inevitably reach a venue.

Undiscovered New York: Drinking History in New York’s Oldest Bars

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Welcome back to Gadling’s weekly series, Undiscovered New York. Don’t act surprised when I tell you we like our bars here in New York. Sure, you can grab some suds in just about any town in the United States, but New York boasts a culture of drinking that goes hand-in-hand with the manic highs and crushing lows of our obsessive-compulsive residents. Just take a look at some of New York’s most famous residents as proof.

Writer Dylan Thomas supposedly drank as many as 18 shots of whiskey one fateful night 1953 before meeting his maker. Beyond Thomas, New York has frequently played host to a literal “who’s who” of famous alcoholic artists, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote and Jackson Pollack. Tragic as their alcoholic deaths may be, their lives are inextricably linked to New York’s hard-boozing culture and legendary taverns and nightspots.

Which leads us to another question – are any of these historic watering holes still open for business? Nobody is saying 18 shots of whiskey is a good idea for anyone, but wouldn’t it be neat to throw back one or two in the same spot as Thomas? What about a bar that’s been open since the Civil War? Click below to get Gadling’s picks of New York’s best historic bars.Bar One: McSorley’s Old Ale House
When you talk about historic bars in New York City, the first name off most people’s lips is McSorley’s. Irish immigrant John McSorley first opened the doors to his legendary ale house on East 7th street in 1854. Since then the bar has played host to everyone from Abraham Lincoln to John Lennon. Females give thanks – up until 1970, McSorley’s did not permit women patrons, a policy reinforced by the bar’s slogan: “Good Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies.” When you stop by down a few pints of McSorley’s famous ale, make sure to drink in the bar’s amazing atmosphere including sawdust-strewn floors and a huge cast-iron furnace behind the bar.

Bar Two: Chumley’s
Ah Chumley’s. Perhaps one of New York’s most famous writer bars, Chumley’s is a former speakeasy and haunt of some of New York’s most famous literary residents. An unmarked door at 86 Bedford Street hides the entrance to the preferred watering hole of such greats as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and E.E. Cummings. Sadly, structural problems with the building forced the closure of Chumley’s in 2007. But fear not, the reconstruction is in progress – we’re all hopeful that Chumley’s will be back in business later this year.

Bar Three: White Horse Tavern
Opened in 1880, the White Horse Tavern may not be New York’s oldest bar, but it more than makes up for it with historic charm. A West Village favorite in the 50’s and 60’s, the White Horse was played host to New York’s thriving bohemian artist scene, including regulars like our friend Dylan Thomas as well as another famous Dylan (Bob) and other cool cats like Jack Kerouac and Doors frontman Jim Morrison.

Bar Four: The Ear Inn
Dating from 1817, The Ear Inn was a famous haunt for New York’s longshoremen, who passed the hours drinking pints awaiting the arrival of merchant ships on the nearby Hudson waterfront. The Ear Inn was originally owned by James Brown, aide to George Washington during the Revolutionary War. The upstairs of The Ear Inn has an interesting history as well, serving at various points as a smuggler hideaway, a brothel and also as a boarding house. Some say the ghost of “Mickey,” a former sailor still awaiting the arrival of his ship, haunts the bar’s interior. I guess when your drink disappears suddenly you now have a built in excuse.

Bar Five: Brooklyn Inn
Manhattan does not have a monopoly on historic bars, and the Brooklyn Inn is proof. The bar’s beautiful interior is adorned with hardwood and intricate tin ceilings. Believe it or not, the carved wood bar was imported piece by piece from Germany. While you take a moment to comprehend the logistics behind such a feat, don’t forget to check out the bar’s eclectic jukebox which boasts some killer tunes for the hood’s legion of music snobs.

Crocodile makes a drinking buddy

by Jamie Rhein on

Wildlife one comes across in ones travels is one way to know you’ve arrived somewhere new. In Singapore, it was the geckos that climbed on our walls to take refuge behind the artwork.

In The Gambia, it was the pouch rats that jumped over the corrugate fence in my back yard or the enormous snake that I can still see in the circle of my flashlight as I was walking to my latrine one night–or that monkey that makes for a terrific tale. Later for that one.

If you’re driving across West Virginia, you might see a black bear dash across the road like I did last summer when I was heading to Washington, D.C.

If you had been in Noonamah Tavern in Noonamah, Australia last Sunday, you’d have been drinking a beer with a crocodile acquaintance. Noonamah is near Litchfield National Park not far from Darwin.

The crocodile might have been underage though since it was only two feet long. According to the AP article on Salon.com, a grown-up can be 16 feet, much harder to get into a bar.

Three guys who saw the crocodile outside the tavern thought it would be neat to bring it inside and have a few. The crocodile didn’t drink, though. They taped its mouth shut. Not a particularly hospitable way to treat a guest, but it was a crocodile with sharp teeth after all.

Happily, the story ends well. There is not a drinking and driving accident to report or anything like that. The salt water crocodile, a protected species, is now at a crocodile farm where it may have come from in the first place.

I wonder if it has come up with any jokes yet? “There were these three guys in a bar. . .”

Drinking in San Juan’s convenience stores

by Grant Martin on

Vacationing in any foreign place takes a little bit of acclimating to get used to the bar scene. You have to know the right bars and locations to go to avoid being labeled as a tourist or getting ripped off. For example, my friend Ered always loves going to “Wine Bars” when we’re in foreign countries — but if something has WINE BAR written in English on the front facade, it’s catering to tourists, right?

In Puerto Rico, many of the locals head to colmados for a cold frosty beverage, which are basically a combination of convenience store, bar and meeting place. Most colmados are of simple construction, with a rudimentary bar in which are built a few coolers holding bottles of Medalla Light, some standing coolers with beer and energy drinks and a blender.

Despite the oft filthy and low lit atmosphere of the colmado, these establishments make up a quaint niche of nightlife in Latin America. The one we swung by for a few pina coladas last weekend was shoddily put together with plywood and populated with torn up barstools and passive Puerto Ricans. We ran into our waitress from that evening’s dinner who told us all about her lesbian girlfriend then continued to hang out with us for the rest of the evening.

Check out Robyn’s page on colmado’s in the Dominican Republic for a perspective of the stores from another Caribbean island and next time you’re tempted to buy pina coladas at the convenience store, jump all over it.

AXE rates best and worst airports for “connections”

by Grant Martin on

It took me a while (halfway through writing the article) to figure out what the exact meaning of the term “connection” was, but now holding the context and the source of the data in the correct light, I can understand why AXE would sponsor a study on travel.

Instead of the “layover” interpretation of the term, 860 participants were asked where the best airports were to make a “connection”, as in, with another person.

The results? Quite opposite to those of a functional nature; Philly, Newark and JFK topped the list of airports in which to meet a member of the opposite sex, while Houston, Sacramento and Tampa were at the bottom (in that reverse order).

Why? Because more often than not, you’re stuck on the eastern seaboard waiting for your delayed flight and have to commiserate with other stranded passengers. Airports with no delays and smooth operation don’t seem to have those problems.

Additional consideration was given to airports with good bars and restaurants inside of security in which to socialize, as well as meditation rooms and magic shops.

More info can be garnered from the PR Newswire.