Dublin @ MindSay

My dear people who contacted me, Life has been much better--Thank you for your encouraging words. I think something inside of me changed so that I wasn't so concerned anymore. I hung out with people yesterday and found a guy I knew before was also feeling as lonely as I was. Today since everyone else went to Belfast, I went around Dublin all on my own--Very confidence building. I got asked for advice or directions several times today... I think it's because tourists aren't wondering around at 830 in the morning. I was able to see the things I wanted to see on my own pace. I went to the library because that was teh first thing open this morning of the things I wanted to see. Then I went back to the National Museum and I was the FIRST person not associated with the museum to have seen it. As a Classicist I became quite excited. There were textiles. Paddington, this next story is filled with ironies. I went to St. Michan's Church--Probably one of the creepiest churches I have ever been in but it was fun in sort of a morbid way. No one goes on tours there. NO one. So I go in, pay my entrance fee get my guidebook and then am told that the guide will collect the tour from in the Church to the VAULTS... What??? I signed up for this? There was a guy in the church when I went in so I just minded my own business. I enjoyed some of the things in the church like the Eagle lecturn or the Red alter cloth. Then the tour guy comes. He's an older fellow with a creepy laugh. He takes us down these steep steps and says mind your head. As I was the only female, the guide was sure to give me extra warnings. There are spiderwebs all over and covered in dust. We proceed down the vault hall and stop at one and there are four mummified bodies lying there in open coffins. The tour guide laughs about how "the coffins weren't made for you. You were made for the coffins." one of the guys was so large he was cut off at the knees and his legs put under him. I saw the bog people... I can handle this. I ask questions trying to keep my cool around this extreeemly morbid event. "You can touch his hand if you want" Uh... I'll stay out here. The other guy and the tour guide walked in the cramped vault and stood over the bodies and touched the hand. OHHHH... Then we go down another vault and one is guarded by four skulls. "they were there when we found it and none of us are touching them." Yum? Then two brothers who were killed for thier part in the 1798 Rebellion--Drawn and quartered--are down the "hall" So we visited them. Their coffins were intact and so it wasn't as creepy. They even have Wolf Tone's Death mask... Coolness. We climb out. Ask a couple more questions and then say goodbye. The other guy and I start talking as we are proceeding down the street. It turns out we are going to the same place. Collins Barracks. Coolness... I have company.

So, this weekend, I went back with my friends to Ireland. We decided to go to Dublin because it was so cheap! And we wanted to see some touristy stuff like castles and maybe even do a little shopping. We got there, and our hotel was amazing. It was huge!



The next night we had to stay in a hostel closer to the city center. It was pretty nice too, but nothing compared to the first night. We were spoiled by that really nice hotel. Anyway, hostels are so cheap and if you can get a private room with some friends, it is very feasible. It makes it nicer to travel when you don’t have to pay much for the transportation or the lodging, that way you can afford food and whatnot. Most of these cities have really expensive restaurants and attractions, so it’s best to save where you can. The first day we walked all around the city, but it rained most of the day. Typical Irish weather, I’m afraid. We got to see Christ Church and the outside of Dublin castle, as well as Zara and H&M…haha. I can’t help it. I love to shop. That night, it stopped raining, so we went out to the Temple Bar area, which is very famous. We ate dinner, fish and chips..yum!, and then we went over to Temple Bar to listen to some live music and mingle a bit. Unfortunately, no one in that bar was Irish except the people that worked there and the band. Oh well. I did meet a German man called Thomas who bought me a drink and told me that my eyes were beautiful and he would like to see them everyday. I thought that was a pretty slick line, so my friends and I talked with him a bit and he was a real crack up.

After that, we went to another bar and got caught up in a group of guys there for a bachelor party. Those guys were really out of control and when we got a picture with them, one of them started licking the side of my face. Strange.



You can see it here. That night, we were walking back to our hostel, and we saw a guy with a rickshaw. He told us that he can get a lot of money from people who look like they’re rich. We asked him how much he would charge us, and he said 2.5E a head. Of course, we couldn’t let that opportunity pass us by, so we rode a rickshaw home. It was hilarious.



The next day, we went back to Dublin Castle for the tour. It was very informative and very cheap. We got to see all of the rooms where the presidents of Ireland have stayed and made negotiations, where British kings have stayed before Ireland got their independence, and the beautiful Irish rugs and Waterford Crystal chandeliers worth 1 million euro each!



We also went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral which had a gorgeous park outside.



After that we went to Grafton street, which had a lot of shops, so I loved it. We saw Elizabeth Hurley there give a short speech about breast cancer awareness, so that was really neat.



 I’d say the highlight of the trip was listening to people with Irish accents, even though my Nana has one, it never gets old for me, also eating Irish candy..mmm Cadburys,



 and last but not least, when Steph got caught doing an Irish jig in the middle of a tourist shop called Carroll’s. I think everyone got a good laugh out of that one…especially the people who worked there.

Once, in Dublin, I beheld a sign painted on the closed shutters of a building marked "Civil Arts Inquiry" and this is what it said:

ART CHANGES PEOPLE
PEOPLE CHANGE THE WORLD

I agree with this. I think this is why it is important to create art. A song on a lonely road, a night at the cinema, a painting that captured the imagination; these things change people in a major way. And that changes the world: oh, how it changes us . . .

Here's the other side of the shuttered doors:

WE ARE DOING NEW WORK
AND THAT IS OUR
DOWNFALL

Now, the whole point of modernism is not really too much of anything definable excepting that it breaks from its past in a major, groundbreaking way. That's how the oddly geometrical, cubist paintings came out, how E.E. Cummings could be so hideously irreverent, and how Ezra Pound could mix a thousand myths and feel like he didn't have to explain himself. It was new and it was shocking.

Was. It was new.

Reactions to modernism can also be considered modernist even if nothing else in their philosophies agrees with another. Gerard Manley Hopkins' reaction was to retreat to an even more ancient past, to early strains of the English language. Was that modernist? There are other questions to this, too; how big of a break does it have to be? does it just have to do with style or is it thought also? a mixture of the two, perhaps?

I've always operated under the principle that there really is nothing new under the sun, and that thought colors my perspective on most subjects; these stenciled shutters make sense to me, though.  

We consistently try to find truth and show it to others in a way that will reach them where they are. We try to disarm and dismay people with our swords of truth and beauty (and whatever other principles we stand for at the moment). That happens in art--from Titian to Picasso--but the newness wears off, becomes faded and shabby. Who is shocked by Andy Warhol's bright Marilyn Monroe pictures now? What is it to us to pick up a copy of Walt Whitman's writhing, hot verses?

I wonder, sometimes, whether my work is also my downfall. No, no, no; it isn't. I'm not writing new things. I'm writing for people to know the truth--I'm writing for them to want the best for other people. I'm writing to help people understand why other people do things. And humanity is humanity the world round; my writing will be culturally dated, it will be stylistically accounted for and conceptually mundane, but I will change the world in my own small-but-maybe-artistic way. I am doing real work, and that is my salvation.

I think my camera wasn't set to "automatic" because these pictures came out strange. But I like how they look anyway.

These were some of the guys from our hostel. I think they're all (except Andy, on the far right, obviously) from Canada, the French-speaking area. The guy on the far left really liked American football and wanted to go to a Vikings game with me sometime. I forgot to give him his e-mail address. This was somewhere in the Temple Bar area, the popular district in Dublin for restaurants, bars and clubs.

This next pic was the same evening with more people from the group we were out with. I think this was on the roof of a four-level club we hung out at (after going to a more traditional Dublin bar). The girl on the left was from France and the girl on the right was from Canada.

The next morning was Sunday. The kids were all due at a place called Hurly Burly, which is apparently a large indoor playground. Shalva had a birthday to attend there, and Michael was nice enough to take Simon and Sydney there to play, so we had Rachel to ourselves. She took us on a walking tour of Dublin, and we couldn’t have asked for a more informed guide.

Our first stop was Trinity Dublin -- one of the isles’ oldest Universities, which is on par with Oxford or Cambridge. Our aim was to see the Book of Cells (pronounced “Kells,” but I’m not sure I’m spelling it right), an illuminated medieval manuscript. In the end, however, we ended up seeing the line to go see the Book of Cells, and the gift shop that it lead to. We decided that we didn’t want to waste our time standing around, so after a brief walk around the campus (which was appropriately dotted with gothic architecture and ivy covered walls) we hit the streets again.
 
Our next destination was Marion Square, one of the few surviving Georgian Squares in Europe. Deborah and I were particularly interested in it because it contained the birthplace of Oscar Wilde. We spent some time gazing reverently at the plaque that was hung outside his birth house before heading across the street to the park, which contained an Oscar Wilde monument consisting of a garish statue of Oscar in a green suit seated on a rock facing to pillars inscribed with his witticisms. My favorite tribute to Oscar Wilde is a couplet by Dorothy Parker that goes: “If I want to try my hand at epigram, but don’t want to take the credit/ We will all assume that Oscar said it.” How apt.


Our heads full of fin de siecle witticisms, we walked away towards a block filled with museums. At my insistence we stopped off at the Dublin Art museum and spent some time looking at the paintings. I was surprised to see a Vermeer in the museum, along with a painting of David beheading Goliath by Orazio Gentileschi that I had studied but never seen in the flesh. I didn’t know it was in Dublin, and was completely taken off guard by it. It was amazing to see.

After the art we headed next door to the Natural History museum, which Rachel referred to as “the Dead Zoo.” I can see why. The building was filled with three stories of stuffed animal carcasses, some of which were quite exotic. There was the requisite wall of deer heads, but also stuffed manatees and tapirs and elephants. Deborah found the whole thing a little creepy, and I can’t say I blame her, but I loved the museum because it was like stepping into a history book. The museum itself was this fabulous old Victorian building, complete with narrow wooden staircases and a bright yellowy orange interior. There was something so old fashioned about the idea of a museum filled with nothing but stuffed animal carcasses that despite the general creepiness of being stared at by hundreds of glass eyes the entire thing was so quaint that I fell in love.


By this time we were getting a little museumed out, and slightly fatigued, so we walked through Dublin’s shopping district to Bewley’s -- a famous old Irish café where various Irish writers used to sip coffee and write masterpieces. It took us a while to get served our coffees and buns, but Rachel told us that Bewley’s is famous for letting you sit as long as you want without ordering or rushing you. The café was a little too crowded for comfortable sitting, however, so we paid up and headed out.

The Dublin shopping district was surprisingly posh. According to Rachel, the stores were more expensive than the stores on the Champs d’elysee in Paris. There was nothing to stop us from browsing, however, so we window-shopped our way down the street. I was on the look out for the statue of Molly Malone that was supposed to be in that district. “Molly Malone” is the most polished song in my dad’s extremely limited repertory at the piano, and I grew up listening to him hammer out the tale of the Irish fishmonger who died of a fever. The song has little to recommend it other than a simple chord structure, but I took a picture any way because of the sentimental associations. Rachel told us that Dubliners are notorious for their lack of respect to public monuments and the statue of Molly Malone was more colloquially known as “the tart with the cart,” but after seeing her bronze cleavage I would say that that is an apt title.

We went for a quick bite at a food pavilion, and then spent the rest of the day shopping for souvenirs and roaming the streets. After a while it grew dark, and we had a plane to catch so we started to walk back. Rachel, at her most Jewish motherly, decided that it was crucial we eat before going on the plane, so we stopped at a pub that was serving a Sunday carvery. Apparently the pub was the same pub Bill Clinton had eaten at when he visited Dublin, and they had preserved the glass that he drank from and hung it over the bar. If the place was good enough for the last decent person to govern America, it was good enough for us, and despite having eaten a late lunch only an hour or so before, we were served a heaping plate of meat, potatoes and veggies. Stuffed, we tottered back to Rachel’s and got our luggage together. Rachel said that there were many attractions that we missed -- Saint Valentine’s collar bone was supposed to be in Dublin, along with the church that saw the first performance of Handel’s Messiah, but we had a plane to catch, so we had to content ourselves with Rachel’s stories.

When we had said our goodbyes to the kids and given our thanks to Rachel and Michael we were driven to the airport. I had had a lot of work due the next week, and papers coming up that I need to start research for, so I was a little wary about taking the weekend off to fly to Dublin. In the end, though, I’m really glad I did. Not only did I get to see a fantastic city, but I got to catch up with a branch of the family that I never see. There’s a lot to be said for traveling when you study abroad, but even more to be said when traveling abroad feels like coming home.   
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