I heard it said in Dublin that Oscar Wilde once proposed that a route across the city by which one did not pass a pub would be a head-scratching puzzle. A local radio station reportedly once ran a contest offering a cash prize to whoever proposed the best solution to Wilde's puzzle. The winning response suggested that you could in fact take any route at all without passing a pub — you'd simply have to stop in all of them along the way. Upon hearing this anecdote, my suspicions that Dublin was a good-time kind of town were happily confirmed.

This is, after all, the city that has bestowed poetically inclined nicknames on several of its better-known landmarks. A statue of the wheelbarrow-toting Irish folk song heroine Molly Malone is affectionately known around town as the "Tart with the Cart." Another sculpture of a woman by the name of Anna Livia in a fountain goes by the "Floozie in the Jacuzzi," among other, less tasteful variants. The Millennium Spire, a high-rise monument which is wildly out-of-place in the city's low-key skyline, has been dubbed the "Why in the Sky," or alternately, any number of colorful variants on the "Erection at the Intersection."

Of course, life isn't all fun and games for the Irish. During a tour of the original Jameson whiskey distillery, we were shown a brief but very dramatic film that put the role of the drink in history on par with, say, man's discovery of fire. "The story of whiskey," crooned the gentle, grandfatherly narrator, "is the story of Ireland itself." The film went on to recount in tragic detail the effects of events such as the potato famine, the Great Depression and the World Wars on the whiskey industry, before arriving triumphantly at Jameson's prominent place in the world of fine liquors today. The film ended with a sweeping montage of cities around the world in which whiskey is enjoyed, including a shot of a statue of Jesus Christ perched atop Rio de Janeiro. The message was clear: Jesus wants you to drink Jameson.

The film and the tour also took a number of shots at Scotland, which is apparently a bitter rival in the whiskey business. "Jameson whiskey is distilled three times to rid it of the smoky flavor found in Scotch," proclaimed an informational sign. The tour guide repeated the same point moments later, and did so again at the taste-testing afterwards. "Unlike Scotch, Jameson whiskey always has a smooth, clean flavor," assured the film. "Scotch distilleries frequently employ slave labor and funnel profits to known terrorist organizations" was not explicitly stated, but the message was clear: Make it a Jameson, or Jesus will cry. I'll drink to that.