Dublin- is broken into thirty-two counties, six of which are in Northern Ireland and twenty-six of which are in the Republic. Dublin is the capital of the republic and the largest city in Ireland. Its main river is the Liffey, its population 1.2 million.
After a semi-insane evening of bar-hopping, nightclub dancing, and more, I arrive at the bus station in Aix at 5 am sharp without sleep on Friday morning, ready to head off to Dublin with Natalie, Kim, Medora, and Kerrie. We coolly navigate ourselves away from the creepy Frenchman offering to drive us the forty-minute distance to the Marseille airport and hop on the much more reliable bus, then sprint to our plane and before we know it we're seeing the sun rise in Dublin and shivering at the large temperature drop between the south of France and the north islands of the Atlantic. From there we hop on another bus to our hostel (The Shining Hostel, what a great name), drop our bags off, and start the tour. We walked down the main street, O'Connell Street, to arrive at Trinity College, oldest college in Dublin. I just found this great guidebook so I'll include random facts that I'm learning as I write. Actually, I'm not going to go chronologically but rather document all the sites we saw and describe them, then add random details that made our trip unique. So O'Connell Street, main street, has this giant thing called The Spire in the middle of it, its the highest thing in Dublin at 120 metres tall, it's just this big metal flagpole type thing that turns into a point at the top, quite ugly I'd say. They have funny names for it, only one of which I remember now (Phalyis in the Palace). O'Connell also has the General Post Office, site of the siege during the 1916 Easter Rebellion where the rebels held out behind ramparts. You can still see bullet holes in the pillars outside the GPO, and when we went on the 1916 Rebellion Tour the guide pointed these out for us and described where the rebels shot from and all the logistics of the six day long battle, it was really interesting.
So we walked down to Trinity, in the heart of the city, and walked through the gates onto a rather small but very beautiful campus, with well manicured lawns and an impressive bookstore. Trinity was founded in 1592, by Queen Elizabeth I, and in its library there is this ancient book of Gospel stories called the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript. We didn't pay to see it but we saw lots of replicas in the bookstore, it was commissioned in the 500s and finished in 800 with this beautiful golden cover that was then stolen or lost over the ages. From there we walked out and saw Oscar Wilde's residence right on the edge of the campus, which is now a center devoted to him. Our hostel was on Marlborough Street, same as The Abbey Theatre (the national theater) and they were playing something of Wilde's while we were there but it was unfortunately sold out. I thought that Ireland, or Dublin at least, took great pride in its literary and cultural history, because they had quotes of James Joyce and Yeats and Wilde all over the place, in the airport and coffeeshops and such. Then we went down to the area with national museums, all of which were free, and we saw the National Gallery and the National Museum of Archeology. On the way we passed by Leinster House, former House of Parliament. The National Gallery was a very good art museum, lots of Italian Renaissance paintings and some stuff from the medieval times, a room of Dutch art, not all forceably Irish works, but they did have a special exhibit on Jack Yeats, who I'd never heard of but he had some interesting work from the early 1900s. They also had some early French impressionist art, which made Natalie and Kerrie pleased because they had missed their class on the French Beaux Arts to come to Ireland, so in a way that was redemption because they were seeing firsthand what they would have been studying in class. the National Museum was not as cool as I'd expected, a lot of artifacts from prehistorical times that didn't really interest me much. We kept waling and found the National Concert Hall, a rather austere grey building for a concert hall, and from there grabbed lunch and ate in St. Stephen's Green. We couldn't really find any traditionally Irish foods other than Irish coffee and drinks and the "Irish breakfast" that none of us wanted to try, so we ate sandwiches and pizza and hamburgers for meals. St. Stephen's Green was probably my favorite spot in Dublin. It's a really big park that of course, has historical significance, but it's semi-touristy but also not in its own way, lots of schoolkids were there in their uniforms eating lunch, drinking on Saturday, and lots of businessmen and women were there with their lunches picnicking on the grass next to a little pond of ducks and swans, and the trees sort of fall over the pond but don't block the sun and the grass is really really really green. At the entrance there's an archway, smaller than Arc de Triomphe, called the Fusilier's Arch, commemoration Irish success in the Second Boer War in 1904. The park was taken in the 1916 Easter Rebellion, but according to lore there was a ceasefire upheld at noon and 6 pm so the parkkeeper could peek his head out of his tower to feed bread to the ducks and swans in the pond and look after their safety, and the bullets would fly as soon as he stepped back in his house.
After lunch we walked up Grafton Street, the main shopping area in Dublin, and they did have good shops. Everything from music to clothes to flowers to chocolate. Again we saw lots of teenagers on lunch break or hanging out after school, more kids than I would have thought in a bustling metropolis. There were streetperformers, these kids doing tricks with a soccer ball, and lots of people campaigning for organizations and asking for donations- it seemed like Irish people were committed in general to causes and street campaigning. At the end of Grafton there's this little statue that's more famous than I think it should be, because it really was nothing special, but its the Molly Malone Statue. Molly Malone, says my book here, was a semi historical figure who was commemorated in the song 'Cockles and Mussels' a Dublin anthem. Finished with shopping, we went to the Office of Tourism, which is conveniently located in a converted Protestant Church, and then took a long walk across the city to the Guiness Storehouse. There we learned how they make Guiness, and sprialed up the world's largest pint glass (the inner core of the building is in the shape of a pint glass) and at the top, Gravity Bar, we were treated to a free pint of Guiness (or Diet Coke, as the case may be). Guiness is definitely not my favorite beverage, but the tour was fun and kind of something you have to do in Dublin. Arthur Guiness, who bought the land where the storehouse is now, signed a lease for 9,000 years at some absurdly cheap price, because Guiness brewing was so essential to the city and still is, and next year they're celebrating the first 250 years of the 9,000 year lease. I learned that 2/3 of Ireland's barley crop each year goes to the production of Guiness. By this time of the day we were super-tired, so we sat at Gravity Bar enjoying the view of the city and then walked back to the hostel, walking through the Temple Bar district which is a yuppie area with bars and nightclubs and the famous Temple Bar, on the way back. We also crossed the Liffey River via the famous Ha'Penny Bridge, Dublin's oldest pedestrian crossing over the river, built in 1816. It's called halfpenny bridge because there used to be a toll levied on people who crossed (you can guess the exact amount) up until 1919.
Back at the hostel we rested up, the other four went out to a pub for dinner while I got some much needed sleep, and then we just hung out in the hostel for a while before bed. The pub's close fairly early here, around 11, and I guess people go out earlier than in France. But the pub's stop serving food around 8, so the girls had to walk to five pubs before finding one that was still serving food. Oh yeah, I forgot that when we were shopping on Grafton Street, there was a big music store blasting songs outside, and they played this one that was very very good, and then coincidentally I heard it again on Saturday, the second day we were there, when we went back to Grafton Street, and I asked who sang it and I was told it was MGMT. This is another coincidence because I just acquired MGMT's music (and in fact this particular song, called Kids), from a boy in our program named Will, who recommended their music to me. Small world.
Day 2: Well rested, we get up for breakfast at the hostel and then head out for more touring. Today we split up a little bit because we all wanted to see different things. Medora and I went together first to Whitefriar Street Church, site of St. Valentine's remains, where we interuppted mass to see his shrine. We didn't really interrupt mass, but it was going on as we walked and saw the shrine because it was inside the nave of the church, and there were other people doing that too so it wasn't disruptive, just a little odd in terms of set up. Maybe this is a good time to share my impressions of Dublin. 1. Catholicism rules. Churches are not only the main historical sites in the city, they are the main sites of meeting and praying and there's mass all day every day everywhere, and we saw people praying and crossing themselves on the bus which is something you maybe don't see everyday. 2. Dublin seems much more....Westernized than France. And I know that makes little sense since France too is in Western Europe, but in France even in Paris more of the culture, from cuisine to fashion to demeanor to traditions, seems to be intact. Dublin almost felt like America, I felt much more like I was at home in a big city, maybe that's just because Irish culture has many things in common with American, not sure. Example, we learn that the stereotype of French people being rude or impolite mainly comes fromt he fact that they don't smile at each other in the street, keep head down, only interact with people they know, etc. In Ireland the streets were more like in America. 3. Ireland is not a melting pot. Lots of the kids I saw were stereotypically Irish, red lips, red hair, freckles, smaller squinty blue or dark jet black eyes, the build of the Irishman. Kids or not, they were adorably cute, I definitely go for the Irish look. 4. Dublin is not a city of skyscrapers, the tallest building is liberty Tower and it's 16 stories, one for each of the 16 men who were executed for their part in the Easter Rebellion. It's actually a really ugly building anyways, I don't think Ireland really has a particular architectural style it's known for, and with none of the buildings out and out being impressive for their styles or height apart from the neoclassical government buildings or customs house, I guess it makes sense that an architectural style didn't really develop. 5. For a big city, people weren't moving to and fro at ninety miles per hour, it wasn't as "stressed" of a city or as neurotic of a city as say New York or Chicago or Paris, people seemed pretty relaxed in general and happy, which made it fun to walk around. I got a good vibe in Dublin.
But where were we on this tour? Oh yes, after St Valentine we took a walking tour based on the 1916 Easter rebellion with this hilariously witty and smart guide Lorcan who had been recommended to me by my friend Melanie. I thought he sort of assumed we knew a little too much about the rebellion because he didn't explain it linearly so I was a little confused at times, but it was a good tour nonetheless and he told us apart parts of Dublin today and what type of people live there and if areas are on the rise or decline. Next we rejoined Natalie Kim and Kerrie for lunch and split up again, with Medora and I now going to see St. Patrick's Cathedral, Christchurch Cathedral, and Dublin Castle. St. Patrick's was very cool, it had a beautiful park behind it with that super green comfy grass, and it was built in the 1500s. It has a fountain where the Irish people were first baptized in the fifth century, and inside the cathedral are the remains of Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels. Also, Handel's Messiah was first performed here in 1742. Christchurch is more centrally located and I think older, there were ruins outside the church of a much older church built on the same spot. Founded 1030 by Sitric, King of the Dublin Norsemen, it's Dublin's oldest building. Then we saw Dublin Castle, which was a big square and similar to Versaille but not as grandiose, it was all red brick and the inside was furnished more simply. I can't figure out whose castle it was, and we didn't go on a tour so I still don't know. It was sort of hidden behind storefronts on the main street in Dublin, so it wasn't breathtaking when you approached it and I thought it was a rather odd place to have a castle, but for all that it seemed to fit for Dublin. Ireland is a republic after all, and they for sure don't commemorate monarchial history. At the same time, our guide on the tour was telling us that a lot of places where the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the fights for independence took place are not as well labeled as they should be, so that walking around the city you lose the sense of historical significance of those major events.
Regrouping, we did some more shopping, revisited St. Stephen's Green, then headed back to Shining Hostel and chilled for a while until dinner, then came back and met some French and German and Spanish guys and hung out with them for a while. Two girls ended up going out to the nightclubs but the other three of us stayed back and slept for a few precious hours before we had to be up at 6 am to do our bus-plane-bus trek back to Aix, which we did successfully and now we're back, with new passport stamps and all! I really enjoyed our time in Dublin, I did not feel like it was a purely commercial, touristy city, but I also felt like it was extremely welcoming and everyone we met was really nice to us. That said, we were all excited to say we were coming home to France, Aix specifically, and to shed our autumn coats the second we stepped off the plane in Marseille. Next week, Ryanair takes me to Madrid. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, Vive Dublin!
No comments:
Post a Comment