Dublin -- January 17-20

I probably shouldn't have done it, but I finished my last exam at 5pm, went to a party at Laurie's and then got up at 7am to go to Dublin. Oh well.

Wednesday:
The first day in Dublin, I took one of those touristy bus tours. I like to do those because then you get a sense of the city and what there is to see and do. It was a lovely tour, but it was cold as hell and I nearly froze to death. I went into a department store to warm up and then after searching for a sandwich, I went to see Pan's Labyrinth (which was heart-rendingly amazing).

Dublin is a very globalized city. I only heard a handful of Irish accents while I was there. If you are planning on going to Ireland, you should definitely see Dublin but only as part of a trip around the rest of the Emerald Isle. If I were to go back to Ireland, I would definitely go to Cork instead. Dublin is not an Irish experience. Oddly enough, the whole time I was in Dublin, I was wishing I was in Scotland. I love Scotland!

So, this is the street my hostel was on. I like staying in Youth Hostelling Assoc hostels because they always have an excellent location. In spite of the fact that this street looks like nothing special, it was on two blocks up from the main drag, O'Connell Street. The hostel seems to entirely staffed and populated by Spaniards. Boy, are they LOUD. Also, some Australian girls, one of whom actually said 'chunder'. It was great! And here is O'Connell, it's as much of a main drag as Dublin can muster. Dublin is actually pretty small, there isn't much in the way of public transportation (except buses) because there's no need for it. So I walked everywhere - which was alright, except that the Guinness Storehouse is about 2 miles outside of town.
So, most of Dublin was the site of one of the bloody battles for independence in 1916. If you can see it, this angel statue has a bullet hole in her elbow. She's not the only one either. Even though the statues have been refurbished, the bullet holes were left alone.
Here's looking south from O'Connell St, across the river Liffey. Like most cities, Dublin sits on a river, but its river is not quite as famous as some other rivers we could mention.
On the bridge over the Liffey, looking west

Thursday:

Today I went to see Trinity College, which was founded 1592. Normally, that might have impressed me. But since St Andrews was founded in 1410, my standards have been raised quite dramatically. However, one extremely impressive thing that Trinity does have is the Book of Kells which is an ancient medieval manuscript. They have a really interesting and informative display that gives you a historical and religious context for the manuscript as well as explaining how the book was made, etc. The book itself is really pretty and amazingly well preserved. I hadn't been wild about going, since I had seen it before, but I thoroughly enjoyed seeing it.

Oh yeah, it was pouring rain and incredibly windy (I could hardly breathe at one point, the wind was so strong!) when I was at Trinity. Afterward I went to the National Museum of History and Archaeology. To be honest, I went there on accident because I thought it was the Natural History museum. However, they do have an amazing collection of Celtic artefacts. And they have 3 bog bodies. Bogs are like marshes, but they are incredibly acidic and ancient people used to like to bury people in them. The bogs preserved the bodies perfectly and scientists like to study them. I think they are very interesting and I like to look at pictures of them, but they creep me out, so I didn't go look at them. Anyway, here's some info about them from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_bodies

Later I made it to the Natural History Museum, but I found that creepy too. First of all, they had a giant shark hanging from the ceiling. So I high-tailed it out of there real quick, let me tell ya. I had wanted to go because I really like the taxidermy exhibits at the San Francisco natural history museum, with all the animals in exhibits that look like their natural habitat. However, the Dublin museum was very 19th century, and the animals were all stuffed into glass cases. They looked dusty and grey and it was all really creepy. No fun.

St Stephen's Green. A very large park in south Dublin. I had lunch here, but it was insanely windy and awful. In fact, the weather was pretty horrific the whole time I was there. Not much rain, but just crazy cold and horribly windy. I hate wind.
I decided to get all the cathedrals at once, so first I went to St Patrick's Cathedral. This is the main Catholic church in Dublin. Jonathan Swift was the dean of this church for the last 30 years of life in the early 18th century.
This is inside St Patrick's Cathedral
Then I went to Christ Church. Here's the outside of Christ Church Cathedral, which is Anglican

Christ Church spire
Then I wandered around Grafton street, which is sort of the Soho of Dublin. Lots of little restaurants and clubs, really cute and fun.

I went to see Miss Potter, which was alright but I'm not really a fan of the sappy romantic movies. At least it had neat little animations of Beatrix Potter's drawings in it.

I took this picture while I was walking back to my hostel that night. The General Post Office on O'Connell St. This is yet another site of the 1916 uprising. I read about the history in a Horrible Histories book a few years ago, but I don't remember it very well. Perhaps I blocked it out of my memory; it is seriously depressing. Nearly every street corner in Dublin has a story about the Troubles, though.

Friday:
I decided to walk out to the Guinness Storehouse, which must've been about 2 miles outside of the central city, in the opposite direction of my hostel. I took lots of pictures along the way though -
The river Liffey again
That large silver spire in the middle of O'Connell St is the millenium spire. Like most of the millenium projects in Europe, it was way over budget and finished later than it was supposed to be. It lights up at night, and is very pretty.

This hotel is owned by the members of U2. It's right on the south bank of the Liffey. It is apparently extremely expensive, aside from the fact that its usually booked up by famous friends of the band. Or so my guidebook says.

This is the James Joyce bridge, it was opened on Bloomsday 2003 (June 16). The Irish love their writers!
Here's an up close of the Joyce bridge
Here's another cool bridge on the Liffey
So, in an effort to promote Irish heritage, Gaelic is an official second language (I think) and so all signs and governmental thingies are written in both Gaelic and English. Such as street signs:
Here's the outside of the Guinness Storehouse. It's actually a pretty cool thing to visit. The tour is pretty interesting. At one point, you can watch some really old film of a cooper making a barrel. Sounds boring when I write it out, but it was really cool. Guinness Ads are pretty funny, but they don't make you watch them (unlike Famous Grouse, which was way lamer). The best part was that on the 7th floor, they had a panoramic windows which allowed a 360 degree view of the city. Oh and you get a free drink! Hurray! I don't drink Guinness, but it was a really nice place to have a coke and chill out.

Then I went to Dublin Castle and took a tour of the State Apartments. This statue of Justice is quite contentious. The castle was built by the English on top of a Viking settlement, which they discovered in the basement a few years ago and now include as part of the tour. Anyway, the statue of Justice is not only not blindfolded, but she has her back to the people of Dublin. In addition, the scales used to become unbalanced whenever it rained. They fixed the scales by drilling holes in the bottom, but that hardly fixed the rest of the country's problems.
Here is more Dublin Castle. It's more of a palace than a castle. The president of Ireland is inaugurated here every 7 years. Apparently, the Vikings were quite crap at building walls and so very little of what they built survives. But when the English built the palace, they pushed the walls down into the ground and thus preserved them.
Inside Dublin castle, where the English royalty used to hold court. Plus the back of my tour group
This chandelier weighs one metric tonne. It hangs in the throne room and is decorated with English roses and Scottish thistles. (Wales wasn't actually considered a country.) Apparently, no one bothered to check whether the ceiling could support the weight when they first installed it, and so the thing almost crashed through the floor.
Then I went to back to Grafton St area and had a very tasty bagel at a place called Munchies. Yum! Then went on a pilgrimage to the statue of Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square Park. Now, I know that Oscar was not the most attractive man we've ever seen, but look at the awful facial expression on this statue! Oh my gosh. How could they even think of putting it in a public place??

Here's more Merrion Square Park. I ate some lunch here too. Parks are the only places that have benches, and so if you get a take away lunch, but have nowhere to take it to, you're stuck in a park. That's fine in summer (I spent almost every afternoon in Washington Sq park when I was in New York), but in winter it's just awful. For one thing, most benches are wet. And even if they are dry, they are butt-freezingly cold. Still, you've got to do what you've got to do.
Here's a statue I found of Michael Collins. He was involved in the uprising also, though I'm not sure how. You can find out about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_%28Irish_leader%29 Or you can watch the movie about him starring Liam Neeson.
Dublin was mostly built up during the Georgian era (1714-1830, during the reign of the Hanoverian kings George I-IV). So, Dublin has all these lovely Georgian door frames, but the doors are all wild colors. Dublin is famous for these doors, and you can buy post cards with pictures of about 12 0r 16 doors on them.
Here's some more doors!
Then I went to the Irish National Gallery, which had some lovely paintings, but I got kicked out after an hour because the museum was closing. I passed some time by haunting some bookstores and ended up with a cheap edition of Jane Austen's Persuasion. Eventually I went to the Savoy Cinema where I fully intended to see Babel. I saw Chicken Run here 7 years ago and I viewed this as a triumphant return. However, it was sold out. So I ran as fast I could over to the theater where I saw Pan's Labyrinth and bought one of the last tickets for the next showing. It was great and totally worth it. I really hope that Adriana Barraza gets some really great roles from this.

Saturday:

My flight to Amsterdam was at 5pm, so I had some time to hang out before I left. I was pretty much over Dublin at this point, and so I walked out to the suburb of Glasnevin to see the National Botanic Garden. Of course, this being winter, everything was out of season. Unfortunately, the weather was awful and I had to hide in the greenhouse for almost an hour waiting for the rain to stop.

Anyway, I took the bus out to the airport and discovered my flight was delayed due to crazy wind and rain. Oh well. I was extremely worried about not knowing Dutch, even though everyone told me that it didn't matter. (It turned out that they were right, but I felt bad that I hadn't even bothered to learn one word of Dutch before I went. I felt like a neo-colonial oppressor almost the whole time I was there).