My cousin Rachel, who hosted my cousin Deborah and myself in Ireland this weekend, did everything she could to give us an authentic Irish experience. As soon as we arrived at the airport, she picked us up along with her two year old son, Simon, and drove us back to her house. After feeding us an Irish meal of brown bread and potato leek soup (the soup from scratch and the bread from the store, both were delicious) she whisked us away to see an Irish play. The play was really fun, the story was about a girl making an experimental film for her thesis at an Irish film school and the efforts of her father to sabotage it. Although some parts were contrived, the banter was so witty that it ended up being a lot of fun. Dublin doesn’t really have a theater district like the West End in London or Broadway in New York. Instead, the theaters (oops, I mean theatres) are spread throughout the downtown.
The theatre we attended was in an older part of town right near Temple Bar, which is apparently the oldest pub in Dublin and is now very popular with tourists. Next to the bar was a store that looked twice its size devoted entirely to Temple Bar merchandise. The area is also famous for its hen parties, and we saw more than one group of inebriated women file by wearing fake tiaras and wedding veils made from toilet paper.
Instead of joining the tourists we decided to go for some post show gelato, which wasn’t very Irish, but tasty nonetheless. During the gelato we amused ourselves by looking out the window and trying to sort out who was a native Dubliner and who was a tourist. According to Rachel, tourists wear coats.
The next morning was Saturday and Rachel’s oldest son Sydney had a chemistry class at the local college, which I think means the local high school, but I’m not sure. The plan was to get a late start and then take a picnic with the kids to the Irish country side. We enjoyed a late breakfast of amazing pastries that I felt compelled to photograph:
and then spent the rest of the morning packing lunches and playing go fish with Simon and Shalva. After a slightly longer delay than we expected, and after the children had fought over who gets what seat and who gets to listen to which CD we were finally on the road. We didn’t get far, however, because traffic was so bad that we ended up turning around and driving back to the city. Instead of the country side we opted to go to the National Museum of Ireland at Collin’s Barracks, a museum of decorative arts which is located in old army barracks.
The museum turned out to be really neat. It was the Dublin version of the Victoria and Albert—artifacts and curios that were taken from cultures all over the world as well as artifacts from Irish history. My personal favorites were the Irish harps that were pretty, and were covered in intricate woodwork. We saw a special exhibit on Philip Treacy, a fashion designer who created these amazingly elaborate hats.
The hats were stunning, though they definitely belonged more in a museum than on a person’s head. One hat in particular was really disturbing, made from the carcasses of dead birds and rats and snakes. I was repulsed by it at first, but Rachel pointed out that if you looked at the silhouetted of the hat it looked like the face of the woman it had been designed for. Okay, so then I was both repulsed and impressed. After the hats we dropped Rachel and Simon off in the coloring room, and Deborah and I took Sydney and Shalva around the museum on a scavenger hunt that the museum provided for the kids. It was a fun way to see the place. I think it was so big that if I were just wandering around I would have been overwhelmed; the scavenger hunt was a fun way to focus our time there.
Once we had completed the scavenger hunt and filled out our worksheets we returned to the coloring room to collect Rachel and Simon. Rachel suggested a trip to the museum café, so we went downstairs and got coffee for the big kids and cookies for the little kids. Refreshed, we decided that if the Irish countryside was out it might be best to go see the Irish seaside, so we drove over to the beach. In order to get to the beach, however, we had to take Rachel’s Jeep over a rickety bridge that was just wide enough for one car, but was used for two way traffic. That was fun. It was about five o’clock by then, but we decided to eat our picnic lunch anyway. The beach was much too cold for any sort of sitting around outside, so we had a car picnic, which Rachel assured us was also a very Irish thing to do.
After lunch Simon had fallen asleep, so Deborah and I took Sydney and Shalva out along the peer, and they had fun worrying me silly by climbing all over the rocks while Deborah and I took photos.
Once the kids had run off the dinner we went back to the car and drove back over the rickety bridge to Rachel’s house. As part of the ongoing effort to show us what the authentic Irish experience was like, Rachel and her husband Michael took us to a Bingo hall that evening.
People in Dublin take bingo seriously. Very seriously. When we showed up at the Bingo hall we were informed that the heat had stopped working, but that didn’t seem to stop the hundreds of people who showed up that night to play. The clientele were mostly the older women you’d expect, but there were also a fair number of young people there, which surprised me. The game was played so that if you were the first person to fill a line of numbers you won two hundred euros, and if you filled your entire board you won four hundred. The numbers went by really quickly, and I found myself eagerly scanning my card to try and win, but alas I went home empty handed. Deborah actually won a round—she had a line filled before anybody else and would have won seventy euros, but didn’t notice until it was too late, and forgot to yell check. We teased her all night.
After bingo Rachel insisted we go out for a chip bundy (see last entry), and we got one for the four of us, but Deborah and I never had more than a bite. Bleh. Before we headed back home, though, we stopped off at Rachel and Michael’s local pub and had authentic Irish drinks—Guinness for me and Bailey’s for Deborah. It had been a long authentic Irish day, and after we had finished our authentic Irish drinks we headed back home to Rachel’s to get some authentic Irish sleep. It was glorious.
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