Europe 24 - Dublin, Day 1

I didn’t intend to wear all green on my first full day in Dublin, but when you are sixteen days into an eighteen-day trip you take what the laundry gods will give you.

We slept in a bit that morning to make up for not sleeping much in Avigliano and then spending the day traveling. I was up a bit earlier than everyone else so I made myself breakfast and discovered that Irish bagels are actually just donut-shaped rolls but they made good sandwiches so it all worked out in the end. I also went on a bit of a walkabout around the neighborhood just to see what was there. There were a lot of murals – the one below being my favorite – and at one point I ran across a boxing club. A quick stop at the Fogg Café on the return trip and then I was back.

It was a very nice thing to be able to walk into a shop and order things without having to use Google Translate or just point at the menu. You don’t realize how exhausting it is to be in a place where you don’t speak the language until you get back to somewhere you do. I suppose this means I need to learn more languages.

There were two commitments on our calendar that day. First, we would head over to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells. And second, we had secured a spot on a walking tour of historic Dublin that would leave from right across the street from Trinity. It seemed like a manageable schedule of events.

We walked down to the bus stop (which was on the other side of the road from where we instinctively thought it should be) and got onto the 27 Bus to Trinity College. All buses in Dublin – or at least all of the ones we saw – are double-decker buses and for an American this is just the best thing ever so naturally we had to get onto the upper level and see the city from ten feet further up in the air than we normally would. It’s the little things that make life interesting.

The bus let us off a few blocks away and we started walking over to Trinity except that we actually had a good bit of time before we were scheduled to go on the tour so we ended up stopping at a giant gift shop named Carroll’s along the way. Carroll’s is two entire floors of Irish kitsch, artwork, and wool sweaters (which they will ship home for you if you ask), and we spent a very happy half hour exploring the place alongside a significant percentage of the other tourists in Dublin that morning. I got my keychains, including one with my dad’s mother’s maiden name and family crest on it – I didn’t even know she had a crest before and now for the princely sum of about two euros I own a copy that can also hold my keys – and we all left the shop happy and just slightly heavier than when we got there. That’s what those stores are for, after all. From there it was a short walk to Trinity.

Trinity College is one of those gorgeous places if you like grey stone buildings and grassy courtyards, and it was fun just to walk around the place until we found the entrance to the Book of Kells exhibit. We waited in a short line for a bit until our appointed hour came and then they let us in early so we just went in.

It starts with a lovely museum of Irish history, full of artifacts and displays, and you just kind of roll along absorbing it all until you get to the Book of Kells, which is kept in its own room.

The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels of the New Testament and it dates to about 800CE. It’s one of the most lavishly illustrated early medieval works in existence and how it survived Vikings, fires, and Oliver Cromwell is not all that clear but it is in remarkably good shape despite some earlier well-intentioned restoration efforts. You’re not allowed to take pictures of it, but the whole thing has been digitized and you can easily find it online. They display two pages at a time and rotate the pages every few weeks so I suppose if you were dedicated and lived nearby you could eventually see them all. It’s smaller than you think it is, but still astonishing.

Once you see the Book of Kells you then follow the path up a set of stairs and into the Long Room of the Trinity College Library which is a sight in itself. It was built in the early 1700s and expanded in the 1850s and it is a place you should visit if you like libraries. It is – as advertised – a very long room, lined with books and dominated by a giant illuminated globe that hangs down from the ceiling.

All down both sides of the room there are marble busts of famous scientists, philosophers, writers, and donors to Trinity, many of which date back to the 18th century. Recently they’ve added four women to the collection in a long-delayed attempt to recognize the contributions women have made to those fields. It’s interesting just to walk slowly down the room and see who’s there.

A lot of the books have been taken off the shelves for a restoration project that they’re doing now but they’ve left enough up in certain areas that you can get a sense of what the place might look like if it were full.

And down the middle they have all sorts of things that are worth seeing.

There’s the Brian Boru harp, a 14th-century instrument that is the oldest surviving Irish harp though it didn’t actually belong to Brian Boru (an earlier High King of Ireland) himself. There aren’t many of these ancient harps around anymore because the English saw harpists as potential organizers of rebellion and decreed that they would be executed so many harpists destroyed their instruments and many of those that escaped that fate were destroyed by the English themselves. If you ever wonder why the Irish don’t like the English very much, a quick survey of Irish history over the last thousand years is a good way to find out.

This of course is why the 1916 Proclamation exists.

The Easter Rising began in April 1916, one of the many attempts by the Irish to rid themselves of English rule and about as successful as most of them. The Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood issued the Proclamation as a declaration of independence from the United Kingdom. The English – deep in the grinding war of attrition that was the Western Front of WWI at the time – regarded this as a stab in the back and responded with ferocity and the Easter Rising was crushed fairly quickly but it did set the stage for what would become the Irish Republic in 1919 and eventually the Irish Free State in 1922.

The Long Room has one of the few original copies of the 1916 Proclamation in existence.

When we were there the Long Room also had a small display of printed works from the Cuala Press, which was founded and run by Elizabeth Yeats and edited by her brother, the poet William Butler Yeats.

We’d split up while we were at the museum, as we tend to do in these places. When you first enter you can see that the whole thing takes you around a loop and you come back down from the Long Room on the other side of the room where you come in, and there’s a gift shop there. We’d agreed that we would simply meet at the gift shop and since I got there first I had some time to look around and see what they had for sale. This didn’t take long and eventually I ended up talking with a couple of the guides who were just there watching the crowd move by. It turned out to be a lovely conversation about art, travel, and museums – apparently there is a museum in Rome that has some secret tunnels originally installed by whatever noble or Pope owned the building at the time and they’re not exactly classified information but neither are they really advertised and if you know to ask you can book a tour of them, so that was interesting to find out. Eventually they headed off to do museum things and Kim and Oliver came down the stairs from the Long Room and this is when we discovered that this was just the satellite gift shop and there was a whole other section of the museum across the way that you had to walk a bit to find.

On the way we stumbled across a miniature version of the sculpture that they have in the courtyard of the Vatican Museum, only this one doesn’t spin. We tried.

Eventually we found the second half of the museum, showed them our tickets, and went inside.

This is a much more modern sort of place, filled with interactive light and sound exhibits that celebrate Irish art and literature more broadly. There’s an entire wall with authors and books painted on it as well as little signs telling you more about them and I’m not sure why Terry Pratchett made the list, but he was there. There were also a number of blank statues including a model harp, each of which had images projected onto it and sounds emerging from hidden speakers.

If you followed the path around you eventually ended up in a little theater where they had a wrap-around movie about the history of the Book of Kells that repeated every seven minutes or so and that was fun to watch.

And in the next room there was yet another exhibit on Irish literature of all kinds with the display changing along with the narrative. You sat on a long bench in the back and watched the show along with whoever else had made it this far, and it was rather impressive.

When you left there the path took you to the much larger gift shop and then out the door into the Trinity College campus again. We found our way over to the café where Kim and I decided that what they had looked perfectly fine though Oliver said he was in the mood for American food by this point in the trip so left for a while and came back with McDonalds. Whatever floats your boat, really.

By this point it was nearly time for our walking tour so we walked out the main gate of Trinity to the little traffic island across the street where there was a statue of a man named Grattan. This was our meeting point, and we hung out there for a while until our tour guide, Jody, appeared.

It turned out that only one other person had booked this tour with us and they never showed up, so we got Jody all to ourselves. He was a fun tour guide and we had a good time with him. He was also very, very Irish and this did have its moments. The tour covered a great deal of history, for example, and one of the recurring characters was King James III, known as The Pretender because his father James II of England had been tossed out during the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 for being Catholic (an odd thing to be as head of the Protestant Church of England) and James III spent many long years trying and failing to restore the Catholic dynasty to power. He was also Bonnie Prince Charlie’s dad. So he is viewed with a certain amount of sympathy in Ireland and he appears in the tour quite a number of times. Except that the Irish accent doesn’t really handle the “th” sound very well – it tends to come out as a softly vocal “t” sound – which meant that every time Jody brought up the guy’s name it came out as “James the Turd.” This will never not be funny to me.

We started at the Colonial Parliament, right across the street from the Gratton statue.

Eventually we made our way over to O’Connell Street where we found the statue of Daniel O’Connell. O’Connell was an Irish politician who led the nationalist effort for home rule against the British in the early 1800s and as such is a well-respected figure in Ireland today. This respect was not shared by the seagull on top of his head, whom Jody confirmed was a constant presence though whether it was the same seagull all the time or a rotating cast of them was unclear. It’s a lovely statue anyway.

We went over to stand in front of it – it sits on a median in the middle of the street with plenty of room for people to gather around it – and while we were there an American football came bouncing into the street nearby. I didn’t see it, but Oliver did and he noted that someone went over to throw it back from where it came and if this were a movie that person would have unleashed a perfect spiral pass and been recruited by Notre Dame as their next walk-on quarterback right there on the spot but this was a random Thursday afternoon in August and the person was not someone who grew up with the weird shape and aerodynamics of an American football and it ended pretty much like you’d expect it would given that description but at least the football was no longer in the middle of the road when it was over.

Just down the road from this is the General Post Office building, which was the site of much of the fighting during the 1916 Easter Rising. You can still see some of the bullet holes in the marble columns.

From there we backtracked to the River Liffey, which bisects Dublin, and walked over the Ha’Penny Bridge (so named for the original toll that pedestrians had to pay when it first opened) and through the Merchant’s Arch.

This path takes you into the Temple Bar area, which Jody insisted was a “tourist trap” that we should avoid at all costs since many of the things that had originally made it interesting had been replaced by things that made more money. We made our way through it and headed off to other places.

Our final stop on the tour was Dublin Castle, which is still being used as a government building even today. He gave us the history of the place and then took us into the big courtyard for a bit before heading bidding us a good day and heading off. It was a very good tour and if you find yourself in Dublin you should look him up.

Also, it has to be said that the guards at the courtyard were very understanding and were willing to let me into the place on matters of dire exigency even though the place had officially closed a few minutes earlier, so long as I promised to be brief, and in the end I think we were all quite happy with how things turned out.

From here we had hoped to go to Evensong at Christ Church. Jody recommended a place to eat dinner which was right by there (The Copper Alley Bistro) so we walked up the street until we found both places. Unfortunately they don’t do Evensong at Christ Church in August, so we mostly just sat on the bench in the courtyard and watched the world go by for a while as the clouds tried to decide whether or not to rain on us without really coming to any decision one way or the other. Oliver discovered the labyrinth in the stone and followed it to the center, which had a nice design there as a reward.

One of the interesting things about Christ Church is the statue they have of Homeless Jesus, which is a reminder that the musclebound gun-toting casually cruel white conservative idol that the American right worships as a Savior is a blasphemous bit nonsense and neither it nor those who would shove it down the throats of the rest of us should be respected in any way. Christianity as a faith exists among the outcasts and the downtrodden and only to the extent that they are valued. Those who forget that walk a sinful path.

We had some time before dinner so we took the opportunity to walk around the city for a bit, stopping at random shops and just taking it all in. It’s interesting the things you find. At one point we tried to locate a restaurant that some friends of ours had been to mere months earlier and had recommended and we actually did find the site but the restaurant was gone now, replaced with something else, and that’s just life in the big city.

Eventually we found our way back to The Copper Alley Bistro and had a very nice meal and some good Irish cider to go with it, though what it is with fried chicken sandwiches in Dublin that can feed a family of four I don’t know. Not that I was complaining, mind you.

The night was still fairly young so we decided to walk back over to O'Connell Street and see what we could find along the way. When you’re in a city there is always a lot to find. We discovered that Daniel O'Connell is not the only one whose statue has turned into a resting spot for seagulls, for example.

We found some interesting manhole covers such as this one.

And we found this statue, which is officially known as “Meeting Place” except that nobody ever calls it that. It’s generally known as “Hags with Bags,” and apparently there is a QR code there now that you can scan in and then the statues will start to talk to you on your phone. We didn’t know that at the time, but the statue was still fun to see.

We found our way back to the River Liffey and hung out by one of the bridges for a while Oliver tested out his theory that any sufficiently busy bar will neither notice nor care if you wander inside in search of the restrooms and it turns out that he was absolutely right about that so take that as a lesson for you in your future travels.

Eventually we made it over to the Portal, which has been reopened though with rather more scrutiny than it had at first.

For those of you who didn’t catch the Portal when it first briefly appeared earlier this year, basically it’s a public Zoom call that connects Dublin with New York City. It opened in May and was scheduled to close this autumn except that while most people had a good time with it some had a bit too much of a good time with it and the authorities shut it down a week after it opened while they figured out how to get people not to flash it or do other similarly stupid things. It was closed when we were there – apparently shutting it down in the evenings when the drunks are most active was one of the things they figured out – and it closed permanently earlier this month, but it was a pretty interesting idea and I hope there are more of these out there someday. Of course people will do stupid things. That’s just people. You might as well enjoy it.

Also, that's James Joyce over there on the left. He seems happy to be taking it all in.

By this point we were getting tired so we took the Red Line tram back to the little station that I’d found the day before and went back to our place.

We settled in for the night and watched the Olympics for a while, and it has to be said that the Irish commentator for the women’s basketball games was just the best thing on television ever. He sounded like he was three beers into a livestream from his mother’s basement and enjoying the hell out of the game and he wanted us to enjoy it too. I’m not even a basketball fan and I had a good time listening to him.