Dublin the Last

      The Book of Kells—Trinity college

      Never heard of it before?  Me either.  The Book of Kells, not Trinity College.  I ran across Trinity College in James Joyce and other such esoteric places.

      According to the official blurb, “The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript written in Latin, and containing the four  gospels. . . . It was created around 800AD by early Christian monks.  . . . It is widely regarded as Ireland’s finest national treasure.”

      “Illuminated” in this case means decorated with bright colors rather than doused in light, since it was done on calfskins, 150 of them.  Between the fancy calligraphy and the Latin, reading the larger-than-life displays was a task.  The Goodwife rented the audio and wandered around trying to coordinate what she saw with what was going into her ears.

      I didn’t think it was worth the trouble to get the audio, especially since my hearing was still compromised.  (Did I mention that I had a bad cold about ten days before we left on our trip that filled my ears with liquid?  Six weeks later, I have periods of normal hearing, which I am informed isn’t too good anyway.)

      I wandered around and read the information accompanying the displays.  As with any work of visual art, things made a lot more sense after someone explained the symbolism and all such things that I never notice just looking at it.

      Above stairs, there was something I did understand without elucidation.  It is called the “Long Room”, and it runs the full length of the big building.  The common folk are allowed to wander up and down the center of the long room.  On either side are huge, like 12 or 15 feet high, shelves full of books, many of them ancient.       

      Students and trained volunteers work at maintaining and preserving the old volumes.  In a room at one end of the hall, you can see them working, wearing white gloves and masks.  The busts are of famous people like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope from the literary world and many scientists like Newton and Einstein. 

      Having drunk our fill at a fount of learning, it was time for a little soup to ward off the drizzly grey day.  Somewhere along in there, the Goodwife got the idea that she should visit a quilt shop.  The waitress spent about ten minutes on her cell phone trying to find the closest one.  There wasn’t one very close.

     I asked her where the tourist information place was.  That was much simpler, just down the street in the next block.  We found it no problem.  We needed to buy new LEAP cards so we could ride the train.

      Supposedly, there were over 600 places to buy or add time to our LEAP cards.  Except, not if you have a tourist LEAP card.  The tourist LEAP card, apparently, has a better rate than a regular one.  If you go to add time to the card, you pay at the regular rate.  Plus, you have to have some idea how much you are going to use it.  You pay by Euros, but you get charged by how much you use the card.

       On the train, you use your card to pass through the turn style when entering a station, and sometimes again when you leave, so they have an idea how much you used your card.  We tried two or three stations where there were live persons manning the ticket window.  They all advised us to find the tourist information office.  So we did.

     The two ladies that waited on us at the office not only sold us a card.  They had a surefire quilt shop we could find.  It was a ways off, but easy to find.  Just follow this street up a hill, past a construction site, turn left when we found something, I don’t remember what.

      As we stood pondering just what street we should be going up, another lady stopped to help us.  She sent us up the correct street, but at the top of the hill, we came to one of those pesky forks in the road that never get mentioned in the instructions.  A friendly policeman had never heard of the quilt shop.  He pulled his cell phone out of his hip pocket and soon had the address.

       It wasn’t as easy as the tourist ladies suggested.  It was on a side street somewhere.  We never found it.  We got sidetracked.  Trying to follow the policeman’s instructions, we passed two old churches standing side by side.  One church claimed to go back to Viking times.  Plus, it said free guided tours.

      We were the only ones in there, so we got our own personal tour guide, a walking history book, he was.  He told us all about the Vikings, coming and taking over Ireland.  Everywhere we went, including Denmark and Iceland, we ran into those rascally Vikings.  They came to Ireland to get women.  They decided to stay because the winters were a lot milder than where they came from. 

       When they converted to Christianity, they built churches.  This particular church had been built, destroyed, and built again about three times.  There is a modern addition, too.  When they were excavating to remodel, they stumbled across some signs of former buildings.  Some of those dig sites are preserved, a rectangular hole in the floor, fenced off so you can peer down and see what the excavators found.

      In other places there are stones etc. from former buildings, tying the current structure to past ones.  The church next door is a Catholic one.  During the English religious wars, Dublin converted to the Anglican Church. This was one of the few Catholic churches that were allowed to exist.
     That ended our quilt shop quest.  We were worn out and ready to find an eatery and head for home.  We tried to find an Irish meal, like corned beef and cabbage, but the waitress told us we would not have much luck finding that dish anytime except lunchtime. 

      We visited two or three castles during our stay.  The most interesting one was Dalkey.  Not that it was too much different from any other castle.  But our tour was conducted by three or four different people.  The first guy had us sit down and watch a short film.  Then he turned us over to an archer, dressed in costume and carrying a real live bow and a quiver of arrows.  He acted the part of the bowman/soldier and explained the ins and outs of conducting a war with bows and arrows.

      He handed us off to a maid, also in costume, who explained some of the domestic details of castle life, sleeping arrangements, cooking, bathing (once a year, maybe, usually in the Spring, right before a wedding).  She led us to the top of the castle walls where we could look at the village and see how the castle could protect the area.

     The maid handed us off to the physician, in this case also a female.  She was impersonating an actual woman who acted as the barber, dentist, and physician for the castle centuries ago.  She explained the tools of the trade, hair cutters, tooth pullers, bleeders, and the processes involved.  That included urinalysis.  She had a jar of urine (supposedly) which she held up to the light, analyzed the color, the smell, AND the taste.  Gross!  I know, it was fake, but still.

      They had to be tough to exist in those olden times.  No wonder the life expectancy was about 40 years.

      When we first got to Dalkey castle, it was nearing noon.  They wouldn’t be open for tours until 2 p.m.  We took a walk up the coast.  It was sunny but chilly.  It would be the nicest day we were there.

      

     The other castle was one that had been modernized and lived in.  The man who lived there died without heirs, so somebody took the castle over and turned it into a museum to try to preserve it.

      In downtown Dublin, we saw huge grain elevators, tall white cement tubes just like in our neck of the woods.  They were standing on the grounds of the Guinness Brewery.  Sure enough, they hold the barley used for brewing.

     We didn’t make the brewery tour.  We bought tickets for the “Hop on, Hop off” bus tour, which takes you all around downtown Dublin.  The double decker bus travels down the narrow streets.  At corners, you could stick your hand out of the window and grab a lamppost. One of the drivers referred to the bicyclists darting in front of him and crossing the streets against the stoplight as “coffin-chasers.”  No kidding.

    To make the most of the bus tour, you need to get an early start, which seemed beyond us.  After tourist season, the busses don’t run past five or six o’clock.  That doesn’t leave much time to get off and look at something.  It does give you a good look at the city and gives you some idea of what you would like to see.                

     Speaking of Guinness, one of my goals was to drink a Guinness in Ireland.  I have drunk a Guinness in England and in America.  I always suspicioned that the Irish don’t send their best product abroad, especially to England.  I shared that thought with a bartender who sniggered without assenting or denying.

      After a few sips of the brew, I confided quietly to the Goodwife that there were better brews in Colorado.  Of course, I have been spoiled by the explosion of microbreweries  we have here.

     We finished off our Ireland stay on a cold rainy day.  We rode the train along the coast line past Dalkey again and on farther.  We turned around in a small village where we ducked into an antique store and fell into a conversation with the proprietress who was having a slow day due to the weather.  She was lamenting the modernization of her small community with the ticky-tacky apartments they are erecting.  The modern harbor was forced on the community against the majority will.  It attracted tourists, though, so she was reluctantly admitting it had been a good deal.  Like nearly everyone we talked to, she wanted to talk politics, American politics as well as Ireland politics.

      We did have a good time in Dublin.  I think we would have liked Ireland better had we left Dublin and got out into the country.  Can’t blame anybody for that except the tour arranger, me.

       Saturday morning found us standing at the bus stop at 7 a.m. waiting for good old 720 or 721 to take us to the airport.  The ladies at the tourist center showed us the way to take the city bus to the airport, but it involved riding to the center of town again and changing busses.  I decided it was better to pay the blue buggers and not have to change busses.

     We reached the airport and searched for WOW Airlines.  Iceland here we come.