Drunk Before Lunch

so tired!
we did a LOT of walking today.
we saw a lot of the city and we estimate we walked at least 15 km over the course of the day.

Today started out with a tour at the Jameson Distillery. It was about 45 min long. It was a great tour. Dave and I both didnt know how whiskey was made. It goes through 8 stages.

1. Grainstore - thats where they stored the gain. They supplied specially selected seeds to the farmers and then bought back the harvest from them.
2. Malting - they let some of the seeds germinate and then roast them while they roast the others right away.
3. Milling - they ground the mix of seed up
4. Mashing - this is when the took the ground up seeds and mashed them with water to make a porridge like substance. The grains that floated to the top was sold back to the farmers as cow feed
5. Fermentation - added yeast to start the fermentation process. This is in a HUGE vat and sits for 80 hours.
6. Distillation - when it starts the process it is 8% alcohol. It then goes through the evaporation process 3 times and ends with 80%. They add back distilled water to take it down to 62%.
7. Maturation - They put the alcohol in used barrel {that was specially selected to be used for other spirits first and then bought back by Jameson} and it has to sit for a minimum of 3 years. Jameson usually waits 7 years or so where it gets to 40something%.
8. Marrying and Vating - once the barrels have reached maturity they are poured into a big vat where they sit for 5 days and blend all the flavours together. It then gets bottled.

The tour finished off with a glass of Jameson Whiskey. I had mine with cranberry juice and Dave had his with ginger ale. We both decided that we like rum better! lol

We came home and had lunch and headed out to the Dublin Castle. It was also a great tour. It is now used for head of state meetings and other government things. We cant wait till we see a "real" castle. Nearby there was the African Day celebration that we stopped into later in the day. Who knew that there was that many Africans around here!
Its kind of weird to go from Toronto thats so multi cultural to Dublin where its not so much.

From the castle we went to a park and found a mall on the way where we stopped for a snack.
We traveled through the park and made our way to the Grand Canal. It doesn't appear to be working now. The water is flowing through it but thats about it. Its so narrow that not too many boats would be comfortable in it. (I think the feeder canal in Dunnville is wider)

At this point we were very tired from walking and made our way home.

We have been buying groceries everyday to keep up with Dave's daily allowance and it has been working very well. We haven't spent the whole daily limit yet.

While making supper and watching TV there was a memorial for the Chinese that died in the earthquake. That is fine except it was in Chinese. We had no idea what was all happening. It was interesting none the less.

now im getting ready to close down for the night.
I wonder how many of you are reading this?
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thanks :)