So we finally made it to Dublin
A visit to Dublin has been on my (embarrassingly humble) bucket list for some years. Last month, we went to Ireland for the wedding of one of Breda's cousins, and decided to spend a week in Dublin afterwards, rather than staying with Breda's family as we usually do.
We stayed at the Pembroke Townhouse in Ballsbridge, which is a little way out of the city centre, but close enough to the places we wanted to see. As I mentioned in my previous post, part of the appeal of it was that the reception area was fairly quiet (no TV), meaning that I could sit there in the evening and do some writing.
For most of the first two days, we mainly used one of the hop-on, hop-off sightseeing buses to get around. In hindsight, this was a mistake, as the service we chose had quite a long route and didn't stop at many of the places we wanted to see. It also wasn't very punctual - the website claimed it ran every 15 minutes, but I don't think we ever waited less than that for a bus to arrive.
We didn't get to see everything we wanted, but we saw a few things we didn't know about beforehand, so it balanced out. Dublin is small enough that most of the places we visited were within walking distance of one another, or just a short bus or tram ride away.
The first place we visited was the GPO (General Post Office) in O'Connell Street. This is famous mainly because it was the rebel HQ during the Easter Rising of 1916. I was vaguely aware that it's a memorial to the Rising and those who died in it, so I was surprised to find that it's also still a functioning post office. Downstairs is a museum about the Rising, its causes and aftermath. This does a good job of explaining what happened and why, though their speaker systems could use some work. They have several videos running on loops, one of which has a lot of gunfire and explosions, and the sound from these tends to travel quite a long way from where the screens are.
The next day, I went to the Dublin Writers Museum. (Breda returned to the GPO, not having seen everything the day before.) Ireland has a rich literary tradition, and this museum packs a lot of it into a small space. The audio guide is included in the ticket price, and mainly provides edited highlights if you don't have the time or the inclination to read all the labels.
Pretty much everyone we asked what to see in Dublin said we should do the Guinness Storehouse, a museum and behind-the-scenes tour of the Guinness brewery. It left me somewhat underwhelmed, though this isn't entirely the attraction's fault. Neither of us is particularly fond of beer, and we had timed tickets for the next place we were going, so we had to go round quicker than we would have liked. It was the most expensive attraction we visited, and most of the tour is unguided (though since we were in a hurry, this wasn't as much of a disadvantage as it might otherwise have been).
The highlight for me was the tasting session, where you learn how to drink Guinness properly. It's not meant to be sipped, because if you do that, you mainly get the head, which doesn't taste very nice on its own. Instead, you should breathe in, take a mouthful, let it lie on your tongue for a couple of seconds to appreciate all the different flavours, swallow, then breathe out. It's not so bad once you get used to it ;-)
The reason we had to rush around the Guinness Storehouse was that we had timed tickets for Kilmainham Gaol. This building will be forever associated with the rebellions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as many of the rebel leaders were held here after they surrendered, and in most cases were executed here. After it closed in 1924, it lay derelict until the 1960s, when it was restored as a museum. The guided tour (included in the price) is short but informative.
The next day, we trudged through a downpour along the bank of the River Liffey to reach the Jeanie Johnston, a replica of a "coffin ship" that took people from Ireland to seek a better life in North America during the Great Famine of the mid-19th century. They were called "coffin ships" because not every passenger survived the journey - already weakened by hunger, they were vulnerable to diseases like cholera and typhoid, which could spread quickly in the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions that were common on board. The original Jeanie Johnston was unusual in that all 2500 of the people she carried on her 16 voyages across the Atlantic lived. This is largely thanks to the ship's doctor, who refused to allow anyone on board who had any signs of illness.
Our final stop was Trinity College, home to the famous Book of Kells. There was quite a long queue to get in - I finished reading one book on my Kindle, and had time to read the sample of another and decide to buy it. The exhibition about the making of the book was more impressive than the book itself. The curators open it to different pages over the weeks and months, and the pages we saw were mostly text, with a little decoration on the capitals.
After the book, we saw the Long Room, the college's old library, which is the largest single-room library in the world. The cataloguing system is unusual, at least for anyone accustomed to the Dewey Decimal System. The books are organised into broad subject areas, but within those, they're shelved by size - tall books on the lower shelves, short ones on the upper. I suppose it makes the librarians' jobs easier when they have to climb ladders to reach the top shelves.
I paid a brief visit to the Science Gallery, a small exhibition space on the edge of the campus that hosts temporary exhibitions exploring the intersections between science and art. The current exhibition is about real versus fake, and how the distinction between the two isn't always clear. Everything in the exhibition is fake in some way or another. Probably the most unusual is a "fake fake" alien corpse. Readers of a certain age might recall a film that surfaced a few years ago, purporting to show an autopsy being carried out on an alien who'd been killed when his (her? its?) spaceship crashed on Earth. (The film was fake, of course, and the alien was a prop made in a special effects workshop.) Soon after the film was released, before it had been revealed as a fake, someone came forward with an alien prop that they claimed had been used in the film. Except that it wasn't the one used in the film, but one they'd made themselves in an effort to discredit the film - a fake fake.
And that was all we had time for. We'll probably go back, and who knows - we might actually plan it next time!
We stayed at the Pembroke Townhouse in Ballsbridge, which is a little way out of the city centre, but close enough to the places we wanted to see. As I mentioned in my previous post, part of the appeal of it was that the reception area was fairly quiet (no TV), meaning that I could sit there in the evening and do some writing.
For most of the first two days, we mainly used one of the hop-on, hop-off sightseeing buses to get around. In hindsight, this was a mistake, as the service we chose had quite a long route and didn't stop at many of the places we wanted to see. It also wasn't very punctual - the website claimed it ran every 15 minutes, but I don't think we ever waited less than that for a bus to arrive.
We didn't get to see everything we wanted, but we saw a few things we didn't know about beforehand, so it balanced out. Dublin is small enough that most of the places we visited were within walking distance of one another, or just a short bus or tram ride away.
The first place we visited was the GPO (General Post Office) in O'Connell Street. This is famous mainly because it was the rebel HQ during the Easter Rising of 1916. I was vaguely aware that it's a memorial to the Rising and those who died in it, so I was surprised to find that it's also still a functioning post office. Downstairs is a museum about the Rising, its causes and aftermath. This does a good job of explaining what happened and why, though their speaker systems could use some work. They have several videos running on loops, one of which has a lot of gunfire and explosions, and the sound from these tends to travel quite a long way from where the screens are.
The next day, I went to the Dublin Writers Museum. (Breda returned to the GPO, not having seen everything the day before.) Ireland has a rich literary tradition, and this museum packs a lot of it into a small space. The audio guide is included in the ticket price, and mainly provides edited highlights if you don't have the time or the inclination to read all the labels.
Pretty much everyone we asked what to see in Dublin said we should do the Guinness Storehouse, a museum and behind-the-scenes tour of the Guinness brewery. It left me somewhat underwhelmed, though this isn't entirely the attraction's fault. Neither of us is particularly fond of beer, and we had timed tickets for the next place we were going, so we had to go round quicker than we would have liked. It was the most expensive attraction we visited, and most of the tour is unguided (though since we were in a hurry, this wasn't as much of a disadvantage as it might otherwise have been).
The highlight for me was the tasting session, where you learn how to drink Guinness properly. It's not meant to be sipped, because if you do that, you mainly get the head, which doesn't taste very nice on its own. Instead, you should breathe in, take a mouthful, let it lie on your tongue for a couple of seconds to appreciate all the different flavours, swallow, then breathe out. It's not so bad once you get used to it ;-)
The reason we had to rush around the Guinness Storehouse was that we had timed tickets for Kilmainham Gaol. This building will be forever associated with the rebellions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as many of the rebel leaders were held here after they surrendered, and in most cases were executed here. After it closed in 1924, it lay derelict until the 1960s, when it was restored as a museum. The guided tour (included in the price) is short but informative.
The next day, we trudged through a downpour along the bank of the River Liffey to reach the Jeanie Johnston, a replica of a "coffin ship" that took people from Ireland to seek a better life in North America during the Great Famine of the mid-19th century. They were called "coffin ships" because not every passenger survived the journey - already weakened by hunger, they were vulnerable to diseases like cholera and typhoid, which could spread quickly in the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions that were common on board. The original Jeanie Johnston was unusual in that all 2500 of the people she carried on her 16 voyages across the Atlantic lived. This is largely thanks to the ship's doctor, who refused to allow anyone on board who had any signs of illness.
Our final stop was Trinity College, home to the famous Book of Kells. There was quite a long queue to get in - I finished reading one book on my Kindle, and had time to read the sample of another and decide to buy it. The exhibition about the making of the book was more impressive than the book itself. The curators open it to different pages over the weeks and months, and the pages we saw were mostly text, with a little decoration on the capitals.
After the book, we saw the Long Room, the college's old library, which is the largest single-room library in the world. The cataloguing system is unusual, at least for anyone accustomed to the Dewey Decimal System. The books are organised into broad subject areas, but within those, they're shelved by size - tall books on the lower shelves, short ones on the upper. I suppose it makes the librarians' jobs easier when they have to climb ladders to reach the top shelves.
I paid a brief visit to the Science Gallery, a small exhibition space on the edge of the campus that hosts temporary exhibitions exploring the intersections between science and art. The current exhibition is about real versus fake, and how the distinction between the two isn't always clear. Everything in the exhibition is fake in some way or another. Probably the most unusual is a "fake fake" alien corpse. Readers of a certain age might recall a film that surfaced a few years ago, purporting to show an autopsy being carried out on an alien who'd been killed when his (her? its?) spaceship crashed on Earth. (The film was fake, of course, and the alien was a prop made in a special effects workshop.) Soon after the film was released, before it had been revealed as a fake, someone came forward with an alien prop that they claimed had been used in the film. Except that it wasn't the one used in the film, but one they'd made themselves in an effort to discredit the film - a fake fake.
And that was all we had time for. We'll probably go back, and who knows - we might actually plan it next time!
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