...watched a U2 concert in Dublin.

In junior high, that's middle school for you whippersnappers, I listened to the radio a lot. That's when I discovered U2's Pride (In the name of love). Then Joshua Tree came out. Then some years passed, and I found myself dating a big U2 fan in college. It seemed like the relationship might be going somewhere (it did, and that "somewhere" has been pretty freaking nice for the last 27 years), so I borrowed her cassettes and CDs and made myself a U2 mixtape. 

As of this posting (October 2020), you can buy a Joshua Tree cassette off ebay for about $5 plus another $7 in shipping. Of course, if you want to listen to it, you might have to buy a DeLorean for around $50k to travel back to the time when you owned a cassette deck. Or you can just queue it up on Spotify. You know, whichever of those two options you like. It's also possible a working DeLorean still has a working tape deck. Problem solved, and nailed it!

OR, option 3. 

If it's 2017, (or if you take your DeLorean back to 2017), you can go see U2 play the entire Joshua Tree album in concert. And if you're a tiny leprechaun version of Russ Rupe, you go see them play it in Dublin. Because of course you do.

I went there thinking it would be a special thing for them to play their hometown; I chose wisely. They've played Dublin many times, of course, but seeing them perform the entire Joshua Tree album at that venue was magical. It's the album that made them, and became the namesake for any band's breakthrough album.

They played on a football pitch (that's a soccer field for you Yanks) in front of 80,000 fans. They opened with a short set of pre-JT tunes (Pride among them). They played the entire JT album, and Bono actually said, "Time to flip the tape." midway through the set. They inverted the song order on Bullet the Blue Sky and Running to Stand Still. I thought that was an improvement. Then they played a selection of great post-JT songs afterwards. 

They played the songs pretty straight up, truer to the album than a lot of live shows I've seen, U2 or otherwise. That was also the right choice. At one point, Bono said, "After 30 years, we feel like we've finally learned how to play these songs." And he was spot on.

Our hotel happened to be where the band stayed (rather than their homes or with family), and they totally asked Heather and me if we would let them get their picture made with us before drinks. That's how I remember it, anyway. 

I had my first Guinness at that hotel bar after the concert. Turns out that I liked it, so now I'm also a big fan of stout. We had an amazing week driving through the Irish countryside, but I'll save that story for another time.