Breakfast, Boots, and Bar-Crawl

Pub Crawl!
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Our first morning greeted us with some sunshine and an Irish breakfast buffet provided by our hotel. This consisted of sausage, bacon, runny scrambled eggs, steamed tomatoes and mushrooms, fruit, cereals, etc… and what they call ‘white or black pudding’, which was of questionable origin!

After stuffing ourselves full, we found our bus to the downtown city center where we were introduced to the Boots Pharmacy staff. The Boots pharmacy chain is similar to our pharmacies back home. It offers not only prescriptions, but also other convenience items such as make-up, clothes, toiletries and other personal items. Some things that are different about their pharmacy is that they offer first aid services at no charge to their customers. Many people take advantage of this because there is a ₤50 (about $75) charge for a walk-in doctor visit. They also offer some health screenings similar to the U.S. (cholesterol, blood glucose) but these services are not formally developed or used very much.

Obadiah singing at the Pub Crawl
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After a brief introduction to the Irish ways of pharmacy, we were split into smaller groups to tour individual facilities. The particular pharmacy I was in was one of the larger facilities and filled an average of 100 prescriptions a day. This, in comparison to pharmacies in the U.S., is a rather small amount. However, they do not have quite the same automation and technology to help speed things up like we have! They still use glass bottles to fill prescriptions and most drugs come in blister packs rather than bulk bottles. Also, because of a government set formulary of drugs they have a smaller amount of stocked medications, making their pharmacies look much more condensed.

An interesting service Boots provides is supervised methadone administration and dispensing. A person who is being treated for opioid withdrawal comes to the pharmacy to get his/her weekly dose of methadone in coordination with a practitioner’s prescription. The pharmacist mixes up a batch of liquid methadone in the morning and fills individual plastic cups for the scheduled patients. The patient then comes in anytime during their specified day and the pharmacist must watch them take the medication. This is to ensure they do not keep the methadone in their mouth and later spit it into a container to be sold on the street! This Boots pharmacy had around 23 patients being supervised for this and the pharmacy is paid quite well to provide this service.

Other interesting differences to note were that ibuprofen and acetaminophen are only available at pharmacies and you must ask the pharmacist for them. There is a maximum of 24 tablets of acetaminophen that can be purchased at a time. Other drugs that are considered ‘pharmacist supervised’ drugs and are kept behind the counter include antihistamines, Flonase, Sudafed, nicotine products, and benzoyl peroxide for topical acne treatment, all of which can only be purchased from the pharmacy. I guess we take our conveniences for granted sometimes in the US!

After finishing up at the pharmacy, we learned of a few other things we take for granted in America: free toilets, water, ice, plastic grocery bags and ketchup! The toilet at the mall costs 40 cents to use, water at restaurants is about $2.50 with no refills, each plastic bag for your groceries is 40 cents and ketchup packets at a burger joint in the mall were 30 cents a pack! Also for those of you who like ranch dressing……NONE in this entire country!

Later that night we continued our learning experience by attending a musical pub crawl. We were entertained with the traditional Irish music and told about the history of the instruments and songs as we traveled to 3 different pubs downtown and sampled the local beverages. We were also informed of what the ‘black pudding’ and ‘white pudding’ were at breakfast—black is made from animal blood clots and white from intestines!-- Not going to eat those again!

At the end of the pub crawl, the performers asked for audience participation by singing our own country’s music. To our dismay, they automatically said they would not accept “American Pie”….. but we know it so well! Obadiah did step up for us though and sang a beautiful lullaby that his mother used to sing to him, “You are my Sunshine”. As impressive as this was, no one could follow him up! Hence, the pub crawl ended and we rushed to a final recommended local pub and caught the last bus home at 11:30 PM. What a day in Dublin!

Mallory Minahan