Dublin! Day 4 (part 2)... and first night in Scotland!

After getting back from our road trip, we dropped Catherine and Sarah off at the music academy, picked up Evan and Caoimhin's brother Naoise and we had a guys trip to the Guinness Storehouse! It was really cool to see how they make Guinness, and also the history of the company. The waterfall behind me in the photo below was to illustrate the use of water in the brewing of Guinness.
We learned that the lease that the founder, Aurthur Guinness, signed a 9000-year lease for an old brewery in 1759.... which is a really long time!
We got to taste some Guinness while learning about the process of malting the barley....
Caoimhin ordering our complementary pints of Guinness in the tower at the top of the storehouse.
The view from the top was really great, you could see the whole city, and on for miles. The picture above is me with Caiomhin and Naoise.

After the storehouse, we picked up the girls and went back to the house so I could get my stuff and make it to the airport for my flight to Edinburgh. The flight to Edinburgh went really well, I had a nice conversation with a woman from Scotland who had lived for 20 years in Canada before moving back. The flight went by very quickly, and we got there ahead of schedule.

I took a taxi to meet my friend Helen (horn player from Apple Hill) at a pub. She had just played a concert and most of the orchestra was in the pub. While we were standing around catching up, a guy bumped into Helen, and when he turned to apologize I saw that I recognized him! It was a friend of mine named Dave who is a cellist that I played with at Apple Hill over four years ago. By the time I made the connection, he was on the other side of the pub, so I yelled to him (which was very strange for Helen, who had seen Dave around, but didn't really know him- and had no idea that I knew him). He looked really surprised at first, but he finally recognized me and came running over to say hi. It was so random to see Dave there, since he is from Northern Ireland, and I had no idea that he was in Edinburgh. It was a great first night!