News and Updates

1. We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging, already in progress.

2. I’m never sure who is going to read about someone else’s travels and mostly I write those posts so I can remember the stories later, but I am grateful to those who took the time to read and travel along with me that way.

3. So, did I miss anything? Any extended barbarism and outright war crimes in the Middle East? Further evidence that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is unfit to walk the streets unsupervised, let alone run for public office? That his supporters and minions are an existential threat to the survival of the American republic? Catastrophic evidence of global climate change that fools will explain away as coincidence even as they bury the dead amid the rubble? Anything? Hello? Is this thing on? I don’t think this thing is on.

4. We’re deep into the semester down at Home Campus and once again I have signed on for 130% of a job so I’m mostly just trying to beat back the nearest alligators and hoping the swamp drains of its own accord. Half the people in my office are new this year so I have become the Answer Guy, which is odd considering how recently I was still the Question Guy. On top of my advising job I’m teaching five classes on three different campuses. Fortunately I’ve made it past the madness of the first few weeks, so that’s a good sign.

5. We now have a soccer team at Home Campus and it’s going about as well as you’d expect for a team that didn’t exist three months ago. They’re learning – the back line isn’t bad though they’re constantly under siege and the goalie is saving them as best he can, but they need to work on their link-up play and getting to the middle third in possession. But they knew this would happen and they’re mostly using this season as a scrimmage to get ready for next year when they will have had more time to gel as a team. I’ve seen parts of a couple of games so far and they’re out there working hard, and as a Philadelphia sports fan that’s pretty much all I ask of a team.

6. About half the team is in my Western Civ class this semester. I’m not sure what a grounding in the transition from medieval to early modern Europe is doing for their game, but perhaps when we get to Machiavelli it will be more useful.

7. The jalapeños in the garden are growing well and I’ve already made two batches of candied jalapeños and one of jalapeño jelly with another batch of jelly that I should make soon. So much to do.

8. I have two long term projects that are rapidly coming to their respective conclusions and that will be a good thing when it happens.

9. Lauren’s trip with Arden went pretty well by all accounts. They spent a week in Guatemala, of all places, and there were many stories to share – some of which, as a parent, I was glad to hear after they were safely over, but that is part of the adventure I suppose. I picked them up at the airport at around 12:30am one Saturday night and got the full Volcano Hike story as well. It is good to have these adventures when you are young and strong, and I’m glad they were able and interested in having them.

10. I wrote out a To Do list a couple of weeks ago and it was depressingly long but I have been chipping away at it and it would be a lot shorter now if I hadn’t been adding more things at the bottom the whole time. But that’s the nature of things these days.

11. Did you know that the Post Office now has D&D-themed stamps? They’re actually really nice, even for those of us who have somehow not gotten into the game despite being exactly the target market for it. And yes, I know, every time I mention a) the Post Office, b) cash purchases, or c) physical media of any kind someone will pop up immediately to condescend at me about how I could possibly still be using any of those things when there are so many shiny digital versions of each of them to choose from, but I like them and will continue to do so. I have my reasons. And they’re really nice stamps.

12. On that note, I somehow managed to get handed half a dozen Bicentennial quarters in a five-day period a couple of weeks ago, which I thought was pretty cool. Add a wheat cent to that haul and it was a good time to be a coin collector.  There are times when the fact that my dad is no longer here to share the news of the day is more deflating than usual, though.

Europe 2024 - From Dublin to Chicago

We didn’t have to be at the airport until early afternoon that day, which meant that we had the entire morning to do things and also that we needed to figure out what to do with our bags if we didn’t want to cart them around Dublin with us while doing so. We didn’t have a lot of bags – we’d done this trip with carry-on luggage, after all – but even that is more than you want to haul around for longer than you have to.

When we asked the staff the night before they were adamant that they could not possibly let us stash our bags behind the front desk, which was confusing since they’d let us do that when we arrived. We’d gotten there a couple of hours before check-in and they were happy to let us keep the bags back there while we foraged for snacks. So there was a bit of a puzzle to work out.

Fortunately Kim asked again that morning and the new person said of course we could do that!

It turns out that there are two entirely separate staffs there – one for the student housing part of it and one for the summer rentals part of it and even though they sit at the same front desk and rent out the same rooms they don’t talk to each other much and they have different policies. The student housing people are much friendlier.

So we dropped off our bags and decided that the best thing we could do on a Saturday morning was to tour a whiskey distillery that included samples, because nothing says “vacation” like drinking whiskey at 11am. Fortunately there was a distillery in the neighborhood, a short walk away, and we got there just about as it was opening.

The Teeling Distillery opened in 2015 and was the first new whiskey distillery in Dublin in over 125 years. Most of the big distillers – Jameson, Powers, and so on – moved out of the city a while ago, and it took a while for pioneers to resettle the place with new distilleries. There are a few more there now. But this one was right in the neighborhood.

We got there before the tours started so they directed us to their café which featured a wide variety of whiskey-related food and drinks including a fascinating joint venture with the Keogh’s potato chip people to produce a Smoked Barbecue and Irish Whiskey flavor chip. It has the Teeling logo right on the bag. They weren’t bad, actually.

When the tour starts you don’t just launch into the tour itself. They let you into a little area where you can look at some displays and get some of the history that way, and there were a few others with us – mostly Americans (including people from Wisconsin and Philadelphia) but also various sorts of Europeans. Eventually we were called to order by Gary, who introduced himself as a “genuine hung-over Irishman.” He had us introduce ourselves and told us that he planned to move to Broomall (a suburb of Philadelphia) with his girlfriend in the next few months and then launched into his presentation.

Where the Irish Whiskey Museum tour was a fairly broad history of both whiskey and Ireland that sought to put it all into context, the Teeling tour was just what it said it was – a walk through an actual working distillery where we could see how the stuff was made. It’s fascinating. Gary took us into the business end of the distillery where he told us about the process – malting, triple-distilling, and so on – and let us wander around a bit to get a closer look at the equipment.

He then ushered us into a darker room where he told us about the aging process – how they age the whiskey only in specific sorts of barrels and how it gets darker and more flavorful over time – before opening up another door to the tasting area.

Our tour came with two drinks – a straight sample of the Teeling Small Batch variety, which I was pleased to discover on sale here in Our Little Town after I got back, and a cocktail which rivals the Aperol Spritz for the title of Summeriest Drink Ever. They were both very good, and they had the cocktail recipe written out for you right on the bar if you wanted to photograph it.

Afterward they let us wander around a bit. On the side wall there was space for people to write their names, so we did that. And then we headed over to the gift shop though we didn’t buy anything, mostly because we didn’t want to lug it home. Fear not – I am now the proud owner of a bottle of Teeling Small Batch Whiskey, purchased upon my return, and as the days get darker and the weather slowly cools I look forward to enjoying it, probably after rather than before any grading I need to do.

We walked back to the apartment lobby to collect our bags and head to the airport, which we decided to do by taxi rather than bus this time. We sat there in the lobby trying to figure out how to do this until the desk person called us over and pointed to a button that they just have sitting on the counter. Apparently so many people call for cabs from this place that the local cab company installed a hot line and all you have to do is push the button and wait about four minutes and a cab will appear as if by magic.

We got to the airport in plenty of time which was good because for the second airport running we found ourselves in a place where the baggage handling system had broken down.

It has to be said that the folks in Dublin were a lot more organized about this situation than those in Naples. Instead of having to fight our way through a madding crowd to get to an immovable line in front of a desk, we were directed to the end of a miles-long line that looped up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal and just follow along. The line moved briskly and people were pretty generous about letting those with impending flights cut in front. We weren’t particularly worried since we had plenty of time and weren’t checking bags anyway and we soon found ourselves in the actual terminal where we were given directions to security.

Security also moved quickly, surprisingly enough, and suddenly we were on the other side with time to spare.

Our first order of business was lunch, since it was about that time. This was a bit of a struggle since everyone at the airport had the same idea at the same time, but we are Resourceful Travelers and Not To Be Put Off though in the end I got rather turned around by the computerized menu screen where I went and ended up with rather more than I could eat but better that than too little, I suppose.

Also, there was shopping.

All European airports double as malls. Up to 15% of the total GDP of every EU and Schengen Area member comes from people buying things at airports, and we did our bit. Kim found someone to sell her the Jo Malone fragrance she’d been looking for, and Oliver and I continued our Boots reconnaissance and found snacks and beverages for the flight.

Eventually we had to get to our gate, and here we experienced firsthand the wonder that friends of ours had told us about: if you are flying from Dublin to the US, you can – and indeed, must, as I didn’t see any way to avoid doing so – go through US Customs in Dublin.

I KNOW!

This turns what is normally a 90-minute process in Chicago at the end of a trans-Atlantic flight when you are tired and cranky and just want to go home into a 20-minute process at the beginning of the flight when you still have the spoons to be polite and humane to the people checking you through. And when you arrive in Chicago you are treated as a domestic flight! It was just glorious.

The flight was long and uneventful, as you want flights to be. It felt like it took forever, even though it was as comfortable as that sort of thing gets. I read the book that I’d borrowed on my phone and started another. The clouds drifted by. Darkness took me and I strayed away through thought and time. Stars wheeled overhead and every day was as long as a life age of the earth. And then we arrived, safe and sound in Chicago.

Lauren picked us up and took us back to Our Little Town, though with a slight detour that just meant we had more time to talk together and that was a lovely thing. We got home and I immediately unpacked my carryon to give to her so she could take it with her on the trip that she and her friend Arden were planning for later that week, and we hung out a bit before she had to go.

It is good to travel, to see new places and friends, to be a bit uncomfortable in the service of greater experiences.

It is good to arrive home, to the familiar and the comfortable.

It will be good to travel again.

Europe 24 - Dublin, Day 2

Our last full day in Dublin began with a quiet breakfast at the kitchen table, as all good days should begin. It is a lovely thing to be able to ease into a day with a nice meal in good company without feeling like you’ve been shot out of a cannon into the swirl of events, scattering bystanders as you go.

We had a few ideas for what to do that day – Dublin is a city where you can easily fill as much time as you have, that way – but our first goal was to visit St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which was a pleasant fifteen-minute walk through our neighborhood and past the elementary school where the road curved to join a somewhat larger road. You could tell it was an elementary school even without reading the signs because a) it had bollards planted along the curb to protect children from drivers who couldn’t manage that curve and b) those bollards were painted to look like pencils, complete with pink erasers at the top. I’m not sure why none of us thought to take a picture of them, but there you go. You will have to trust me on this one.

St. Patrick’s is a gorgeous Gothic pile of a place and I’ve always thought that this is what cathedrals ought to look like rather than the – admittedly beautiful – brightly lit Romanesque churches full of Renaissance art that one finds in Italy. It’s grey stone and dark wood and stained glass and we spent a happy few hours wandering around the place.

You come on it fairly quickly once you get past the elementary school, as it just kind of sits there not far from the little grocery store where Oliver and I had found snacks on our first day in Dublin, and it seems to me that this kind of serendipity in buildings is what neighborhoods are all about. Even something as grand as a cathedral is just part of the area. Zoning is boring.

We bought our tickets – only in Italy are churches free – and found our way into the nave, and it was as lovely as we were hoping it would be.

It was also crowded, both in the “wow there are a lot of my fellow tourists in here with me” sort of way as well as in a “this is a living church with services and ceremonies that happen all the time” kind of way, which wasn’t a feeling I got from many of the Italian churches we visited. Those often have the feel of monuments to past glory that sometimes have small groups of people huddling in the shadows of the ancients. St. Patrick’s seemed like the kind of living place where a mass or a youth group meeting could break out at any moment if you weren’t careful and people would show up because that’s just what they would do.

Fortunately for us we seemed to be between events, so we had the run of the place for a while. We split up, as usual, and I worked my way counterclockwise around the outer edges of the building before heading into the middle for another circuit. There was a lot to see.

Everywhere you look at St. Patrick’s there are memorials to the dead. They’re carved into the stone. They’re embedded in the floor. They’re cast in brass. It’s just that kind of place.

Jonathan Swift – best known today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal – was born in Dublin and graduated from Trinity College before becoming (among other things) a dean of the Cathedral, and he is buried there. There are several memorials to him, as well as to his longtime (and from what I have been able to find rather ambiguously defined) companion Hester Johnson, usually known as Stella.

There is also a rather grand memorial to the Boyle family, which dates to 1632. One of the later Boyles, Sir Robert, is generally regarded as a founder of modern chemistry (he’s the guy who came up with Boyle’s Law, which is the thing you forgot when you were trying to determine how the volume of a gas changed as the temperature increased on that exam back in high school) and as a chemist this was something Kim enjoyed seeing.

Most of the memorials were to people we didn’t know. So many memorials exist to remember events and people that nobody remembers. It’s all that is left of some of these people and that is a strange thought indeed. There’s a lot of them, though, and you can spend a good chunk of your day just reading them all as you walk by.

They even have memorials that you can create while you’re there if you want to remember someone you knew, which is a nice thing to do for people.

There are also a great many stone carvings, some of which are clearly tombs and some of which seem to be more broadly Christian markers. Some of them are very, very old.

The thing about St. Patrick’s is that every time you think you have reached the back end it unfolds into something else and keeps going. There’s a really gorgeous choir area that seemed like it was getting toward the back of the place, for example.

But then behind that there was this little chapel-like space a bit further on.

Eventually you do get to the end of things, though, and there’s another little chapel there just waiting for you, perhaps as a reward for your persistence or perhaps just because that’s where there was room to put it. You never know.

Everywhere you look is stained glass.

Toward the end of my circuit I stumbled across this area, which is dedicated to the various Irish military units that served the Empire prior to Irish independence. The flags are interesting because they are not preserved in any way. The plan is just to let them slowly fall apart naturally. I’m not sure what the purpose of that is, but it is an interesting idea and it does convey a sense of age.

 

After I’d made my circuit I went back up the middle of the nave and found all sorts of other things. There was a small area where you could do brass rubbings, for example. They had some brass plaques and as much paper as you wanted but when I tried it came out as an amorphous black blob on the paper – my artistic skills remain as powerful as ever, in other words. Oliver and Kim had better luck with it.

Also, if you looked very carefully at the arches, you’d find these little heads carved into the stone. I’m sure they have some deeper meaning than the “oh, wow, aren’t those adorable!” reaction that I had, but then it was my vacation and I reserve the right to have whatever reactions I wish.

There was also this door, which came with a long story about the origins of the phrase “to chance your arm,” an expression that I’d never heard before and therefore did not realize needed to be explained. Apparently it is now used as a general phrase meaning “to take a risk” and it comes from a battle where those on the losing side took refuge in the Cathedral’s Chapter House and were then guaranteed safe passage out of Dublin by the winners. The losers thought this was a trick until the leader of the winners had a hole cut in the door and then reached in to shake hands on the deal, risking his arm in the process.

After spending some time and money in the gift shop we headed back outside where we found some fairly odd sculptures and a nice little grassy park on the other side of the Cathedral. It was a pleasant place to walk and you could get a good view of the Cathedral from there.

Our next goal was the Chester Beatty Library, which houses the collections of – wait for it – Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, who had an interest in ancient religious manuscripts and artifacts and the money to collect such things. His interests were broader than Christianity, though, and the museum has an extensive collection of Islamic, Persian, and East Asian material as well as some of the earliest Christian papyri in the world. There’s a lot to see.

The Chester Beatty, as it is more commonly known, is not that far from St. Patrick’s and it was a pleasant walk from the one to the other. It sits on a lovely bit of property just across from Dublin Castle and there’s a nice area outside for when you get tired or just want to spend some time in the open air and not walking.

The atrium when you first get in is also quite something. There’s a little gift shop on the left – mostly books and artwork – and a café on the right and we would get to both of them in due time.

The main attraction of the Chester Beatty is the vast collection of texts, which are displayed on multiple floors in many different rooms. There are texts in scripts you’ve never heard of. Texts in scripts you have heard of but can’t read. Texts in scripts you feel you ought to be able to read but they’re so ornate and ancient that it’s hard to tell. If you like religious books and texts, this is your place.

The papyri are fascinating to see as well. They’re smaller than you’d think they were and some of them are not in great shape, but they are so unfathomably ancient that they’re just astonishing.

Sometimes things are engraved on gold rather than written on parchment or papyrus.

And of course where there are texts there are illustrations, and there are plenty of those as well if you prefer artwork to texts.

 

The place is four floors tall and when you get all the way up to the top there’s a rooftop garden where you can hang out for a bit and look out over the lawn toward Dublin Castle. From this elevation you can actually see the pattern carved into the grass, which isn’t obvious at ground level. After lunch Kim and Oliver returned to the museum but I’d seen everything I wanted to see so I just took a long slow stroll around the perimeter of the lawn, poking my head into the various bits of flora and stonework along the way. I ran into a wedding photoshoot at one point, and really you can understand why they’d go there for that though I’m not sure why they thought they’d have the place to themselves for long enough to take photos like that. I may be in the background of someone’s wedding album is what I’m saying here. I hope I look presentable.

Directly across from the entrance to the rooftop garden, at the end of the little fourth-floor hallway that is the only access to the room that I could find, there was a small room full of illustrations from a medieval European manuscript known as the Hamilton Field Book of Hours, named after the American artist who owned it before Beatty bought it in 1927. It dates to the early 1400s CE and is mostly in Latin with a bit of French thrown in. The pages are very small but the whole thing rates a separate room of its own in a museum full of treasures, so it was worth a look.

When our meet-up time arrived we all agreed we were hungry so we stopped at the café in the atrium – the Silk Road Café, as it is called – and had a lovely lunch which we ate outside.

Oliver wanted to go to the Irish National Museum after this, but there are about a hundred of those, all sort of loosely linked together and generally right by one another. So we started walking in that general direction to see where we’d end up. Dublin is a fun city for that, it turns out, and there is a lot to see if you’re paying attention.

We ended up at the Irish National Museum of Archeology, which deals with the more ancient side of things. It’s a pretty impressive place from the moment you walk in.

They have artifacts there that go back three thousand years or more, and you just kind of wander around making sharp corners here and there and finding yourself in entirely new parts of the museum with hitherto unsuspected vistas of antiquities spread out before you. One of the first things you come to is a room filled with enough gold to gild every lily in Florence, arranged neatly and catalogued precisely and mostly you end up wondering how they had so much gold back then because it really is quite a lot.

There are a number of Celtic crosses here and there, as well as a chalice that apparently I should have known about ahead of time – the Ardagh Chalice, which dates from the 8th century CE – and a harp as well.

There are just rooms and rooms of artifacts, and they’re all pretty interesting. We spent a couple of hours just kind of wandering around on our own, occasionally bumping into each other and exclaiming over something we’d just seen.

The bog boat was pretty impressive, though. Apparently it goes back to about 2500BCE, which is a long time ago.

I think my favorite thing in the museum, though, was this guy, mostly because he seemed pretty amused at being a disembodied stone head encased in a glass box and you have to appreciate someone who can roll with things like that.

Oliver wanted to explore the museum further after our agreed-upon meeting time so we made plans to catch up later at the Irish Whiskey Museum and then Kim and I headed out to the nearest Pret-A-Manger for a snack because by that point we were hungry and while Pret does not provide gourmet food it does deliver on what it says it will and that was all we asked of them. After that we found a Jo Malone store where Kim searched for a fragrance she had wanted and then went to a Boots, mostly because we had been talking about Boots (Bootses?) and suddenly there one was and it seemed like destiny so who were we to refuse.

There was a busker outside the Jo Malone shop – a young woman with a guitar – and it has to be said that the busker quality level in Dublin is very high. I don’t think you could get away with doing that in Dublin if you weren’t really good at it.

We reconvened at the Irish Whiskey Museum, a fascinating place that is exactly what it says on the tin. You head upstairs and buy your tickets and in return you get a guided tour of the history of Irish whiskey. Some of that is the history of the beverage itself – smoother than Scotch whiskey because it’s triple distilled instead of double-distilled – and some of it is the broader context of how Irish whiskey has fared through the ages. Hint: English retaliation for Irish independence in the 1920s plus the sheer unmitigated dumbassery of Prohibition in the US in that decade did Irish whiskey no favors and many of the distilleries that existed in Ireland in 1920 were gone not long afterward. Our tour guide Matthew clearly enjoys his job and kept us well informed and entertained for the hour we were there.

The highlight of the tour is of course the tasting at the end. We got the regular tour, which came with three whiskeys (the deluxe tour came with four) and they were all quite good though we each had our preferences. My favorite, if I recall correctly, was the Fercullen Falls.

They actually do have a bar right there in the museum where you can go once the tastings are done and you’ve worked your way through the inevitable gift shop (not that I am complaining about that in any way – gift shops are fun, whether you buy anything or not), and we spent some time there being serenaded by a guy with the guitar and sampling further whiskeys.

By this point we were actually getting hungry for dinner so we left in search of a place that would provide such a thing. Instead we ended up at the statue of Molly Malone (known locally as The Tart With The Cart). Apparently if you rub her boobs it is considered good luck, or maybe people just say that as an excuse to rub her boobs. I don’t know. We left the rubbing to others and enjoyed the two guys busking a few feet away instead. They did a nice version of Caledonia that was fun to sing along with.

Just up the block from that was a Nando’s and we decided that a cheeky Nandos was just the thing.

I’m not sure when the adjective “cheeky” became a mandatory part of any description of going to Nando’s. If you’ve never been there, it’s a chicken place. You can get a quarter or a half of a small chicken – or a whole one, if you’d like – plus sides and various hot sauces, and it’s actually very good. I’d been to one in Illinois back before the pandemic while I was waiting for Lauren to finish an afternoon event for her foreign exchange program and I enjoyed it but it didn’t seem particularly cheeky to me. After a bit of investigating that turned up nothing I finally took to social media to ask my British friends what it took for Nando’s to qualify as “cheeky” and got an answer from Richard. “Originally spur of the moment,” he said, “particularly as being one of the less bad spontaneous decisions you can take after too much alcohol,” though he noted that meanings change over time. “By now it is redundant, as every Nando’s is considered cheeky.”

So now you know.

It was good food in any event, cheeky or otherwise, and while we were sitting there figuring out what we wanted to order a group of American teenagers stopped by our table on their way out and asked if we wanted their gift card since they’d forgotten to use it and were leaving town the next day and wouldn’t get another chance. It was a very nice thing to do and it paid for about half of our dinner!

We took the 151 bus back to our apartment. The bus stop was one of those big ones where half the buses in the city seem to stop so we waited there for a while along with a large and boisterous crowd, enjoying the scenery and the sculpture across the way until our bus came by.

 

 

We rode back on the top of the double-decker bus to our stop, where the squirrel painted by the fence told us we’d arrived. A quick grocery run for breakfast stuff and road food for the next day and we were back in the apartment idly watching the Olympics and – with some travail – securing our boarding passes for the flight back home.