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 gorgeous – 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 one of the founders 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 but 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 they say 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 American prohibition 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 stops were 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.