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The plush hotel has a plush bar associated with it - The Horseshoe Bar - named, undoubtedly after the shape of the bar at its centre. This is a posh bar in a hotel, and at such a bar you can hope to share the air with a bunch of chain-smoking toffs and their insipid spice, asking pedestrian questions about the Euro - it's a currency, live with it! Or, perhaps you can enjoy a drink, rubbing shoulders with spoilt little rich girls, who pout and harrumph until their friends, wearing flowing and decadent attire, bring the champagne... and light up. Yes, it seemed that the clientele of The Horseshoe Bar were not gritty down to earth non-smoking types!
The tables in this establishment also seem to have a strange sort of rim on them. There's the flat part of the table and then what might seem a bit like a fence or barricade running around the perimeter. At first I took this to be an ingenious way of fitting as many drinks as possible on the table without it being possible for any of them to fall off. After a while, I came to the conclusion that the rim was actually there to make it impossible for you to put your elbows on the table - a sort of forced etiquette if you will. Either that, or it was especially there to keep the ash tray in place - smoking appearing to be almost mandatory in the place. I assume it wasn't entirely mandatory since we weren't thrown out for not doing it.
We stayed in the bar long enough to have the second Guinness of the day. It's the second one that usually floors me! (And, from previous experience, we can see that anything can happen when I have a few too many Guinnesses.) However, we weren't there to be sitting in a bar all night - no, we had food to find. Where better than Temple Bar - a swanky district, full of eateries and the like. Where better indeed? It seems that we'd not thought this through - trying to get a meal without reservations on a Saturday night in Dublin proved... er... tricky.
I think it's fair to say that one of the things we had difficulty with, as a couple, was agreeing on things like a place to eat. The problem wasn't so much a conflict of ideas as a dearth of commitment. Caroline would be quite good at saying what she didn't want, and I was quite good at finding something acceptable anywhere we went. The problem was tying it down. A combination of non-committal answers from me and short-patience from her meant we were often likely to have trouble finding something that we could decide on.
This night was no exception to our experience of problems in finding an eatery by wandering around looking - especially since we had our choices limited by the fact that we hadn't booked. Caroline's priorities were "something I want and as soon as possible" mine were "anything that she wants and whenever". Sadly, the initial offer of a 45 to 60 minute wait for a table proved enough to send us into panic mode over whether we'd get anything suitable. Had we simply had a few drinks and waited our turn, we'd have had a relatively unstressful evening. As it was, we chose to spend some of our precious time looking for alternatives and, of course, arguing. After wandering and reaching the end of our options and our tethers, we found somewhere. Keogh's I believe.
The food was good, though the waiter managed to accidentally serve our meal to someone else - and there was some incident involving a Spanish girl's arse which I can't quite read from my notes. Let's assume it was hilarious but not worthy of recording to posterity in any more detail than that. Sadly, it seems that my grouting and filler fetish made me feel that the toilets were not up to standard. Shame.
The food-finding panic over, we returned to the hotel. I learned my lesson and booked the table for the following night like a good boy. We went to another of the hotel's bars where we enjoyed a night cap or two. People were knocking back the drinks - Bailey's, Tia Maria, Grand Marnier - they are all drinks. We also chatted to some random Irish man - quite advanced in years - who was quite excited because he was "going to see the strippers"... I'm not sure what you're supposed to say to someone who brings that into the conversation. I advised him to remain fully clothed himself - he seemed to like that.
I think we slept well, in the after-glow of a well-filled day.
19 May 2004
Ashley Frieze