I've Seen the Book

Start: A wonderful little room in Avalon House, Dublin

End: A crappy little room in Avalon House, Dublin

Dublin, or at least the part of it we’ve been wandering around, is pretty generically City.  And Nathan and I- we are not so much City people.  Especially since we’re not big drinkers, and I’m in no condition to go dancing (although I went sans brace today and was fine, so yay improvement!).  Certain cities are exceptions to this- for instance we are both utterly in love with Edinburgh- but for the most part cities are just cities, and oftentimes depressingly similar to one another (especially when it comes to that special blended fragrance of beer and urine).  Perhaps we will feel differently once we’ve had a chance to explore other parts of Dublin, but for the moment it is a city I am feeling no melancholy over leaving.

We got up relatively early this morning and made our way up and over to Trinity College, which in spite of the above paragraph was absolutely lovely- except for their strange neurosis about not letting anyone on the lawns.  I felt deeply sorry for the students, deprived of the age-old right of sunning themselves on the quad on the first fine day of spring.  But perhaps the students and Trinity are too Serious for such?

Click to embiggen the details

At any rate, the reason we got up so early was to go see the Book of Kells before the queue got ridiculous (yes, I am back in a land where that word is appropriate, and I am re-embracing the hell out of it).  As it was we got there before the exhibition opened, and still had to wait a good twenty-thirty minutes to get in.  Crazy pants.  (And on our way out the queue had grown to be literally three times as long!  Nathan turned to me and said “Thank you for making us come early.”)

Do you know what else is crazy pants?  The incredible frickin’ skill of the monks who wrote and illuminated those Books.  It was… absolutely mind-blowing, the precision and tiny, intricate details.  I was filled with awe and envy and a sudden desire to add even more abstract design elements to my angels.  (And, possibly, All the Things.)  From that exhibition we moved into the Long Room of the Old Library, where I was so overwhelmed with by the number and presence of  Old Books that I was near brought to tears.  Let me tell you, Gentle Readers who are also Bibliophiles- you may think you know the smell of Old Books, but I assure you there is still another, deeper layer to that Scent which you cannot know until you have been surrounded by books that are not just decades but centuries old.  It is... humbling.  And probably marks me out as the nerd I am.  I just sat there for a good ten minutes, beaming and wishing I could be allowed to touch them...

By the time we left Trinity it was about 1230, or, in other words, the perfect time to go to the Guinness Storehouse and get our grub on.  We’d had a rather disappointing pair of breakfasts (bland bland bland- it’s like the Irish decided to take over the disproven English stereotype), so we were, once again, ravenous.

Guinness was really more Nathan’s thing than mine- I don’t drink beer, and I’ve been on brewery tours before and let’s face it, once you know how beer is made you know how beer is made.  All that aside, however, it was a good time- the building itself was a marvel of people-shuffling-engineering, not to mention beautiful in a thoroughly modern way.  And it was fun to watch my husband learn to pull a perfect pint of Guinness, and to chat it up with a couple from the other Vancouver.

We ended up getting lunch there, settling on the special: Guinness stew* topped with mash.  It.  Was.  Delicious.  It was exactly the sort of thing I’d expected to be able to get in Ireland!  Not to mention there was a live trad band playing, to really make the atmosphere.  (We comfort ourselves that there will be no shortage of good, traditional Irish food in the smaller areas we're going to visit- it's just that the City feels the need to prove how Modern it is...)

From there it was a leisurely stroll back to the hostel, which we broke up with a stop for gourmet hand-made ice cream; I tried redbean-and-chocolate, bacon-and-maple**, and blueberry-elderberry, but settled on the comparatively tame lemon meringue, which they topped with real bits of meringue!  Nathan had a scoop of Guinness ice cream and said it was very yeasty and good.  We also made a visit to a random cathedral: St. Augustine & St. John’s.  It was, to my mind, a great deal more impressive than Christchurch, and I felt vaguely resentful that it wasn’t even mentioned in the near-useless travel book (which I suppose is why we are so adamant about our aimless wandering).  We popped into St. Audoen's, as well, just because it was there, and learned about church guilds.

"Blandening": now a word.

And then we were back at the hostel, and getting the key to our new room (apparently the Nice Room was only available for the one night?), and then in the new room and I was tired enough that I could not help but feel bitterly disappointed what a step down in quality it was (bunk beds and no accessible outlet, for starters).  Especially since the windows weren’t open, so it was hot and stuffy.  I may have whined.  A lot.  But after some rest (and an airing out) I’m feeling better about the world, and looking forward to tomorrow’s adventure: driving.

*(And thanks to my Glutenflam, I was able to enjoy it with minimal discomfort later on)

**(Keeping in mind that ‘bacon’ in the UK and Ireland is closer to what we think of as Canadian bacon, aka ham.  The flavor was too off from my norm for me to be able to enjoy it…)