Waking up at 5am is only ever nice when you're going on holiday. Today has been a very long day and I'm about to head off to bed. Before that though, a few quick words.

Our flight over from Birmingham was a bit of a failure with an hour delay and Aer Lingus losing the bag that Gus and I are sharing. After Gus made and received a few texts and phone calls, we finally received the bag soon before 11pm. We're all sorted now though and can clean our teeth before bed!

To get from the airport to the hotel, we purchased day tickets that covered us for all Dublin buses and tram (Luas) services for €7.50. We have completed rinced the ticket getting great value for money. We've been up and down the red line a few times and used a fair few busses to get around.

First impressions are that Dublin is a really clean city. It has a suprising likeness with England but it's definitely foreign, highlited by the fact that beer is sold in Euros and buying a round for friends requires a small mortgage.

I've been on the Guinness for the first time in my life today and it's great. I was quite surprised when I had my first pint at how enjoyable it was, the last time I tried stout, I found it really awful. Mushroom was pleased that the first pub we went to was O'Donoghue's where The Dubliners started out and in our true nature we've visited a number of other establishments today.

Despite a busy day, I feel almost like we've just been settling in, we didn't really do any sight seeing other than a brief walk past the Millenium Needle. Tomorrow we'll have a full day to walk around, and properly experience the city, which will be great. Of course, we're also going to do our duty and perform our 'D' pub crawl - I can see my special tshirt from here!