Dublin Hotels
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Dublin Revisited
Entry 6 of 12 | show all | print this entry |
Brian and I took the bus into Dublin for the day. I'm still trying to sort out the experience. It only took a minute to get oriented, but there were surprises around every corner. We hadn't walked three blocks from the bus station before I was looking at the General Post Office on O'Connell street (the one that was shelled when the British sent gun boats up the River Liffey). Right in front of the post office, they've erected a massive aluminum spire - a symbol of hope (so the guide books say); for me a symbol that everything remembered would be accompanied by something new. The last time I was in Dublin, smoking was almost compulsory in the pubs, now it's banned nearly everywhere. The last time I was here, it was a thriving hub of Irish culture - Irish people worked in the shops, and Irish tourists from other cities and from the country made up the bulk of the tourist population (on weekends, they would be outnumbered, at least as measured in decibels, by German and Dutch tourists who flooded in to the Temple Bar area South of the Liffey). Now people working in the shops are from all over the world - Asian, African, East European, South American. It lends a very cosmopolitan feel to the city - for lack of a better way to describe it, it feels a lot more like any other European city I've been in, and a lot less like the capital of Ireland. Street musicians play folk music from South America and New Orleans Jazz instead of fiddle and flute celtic folk tunes. I hadn't realized it before, but when I was last in Dublin, nearly everyone was paler than I am; now I'd guess roughly half of the people in the city are people of color. Brian and I had lunch in a pub where both of the waitresses were obviously Polish. When I was last in the Republic, I talked to a man in a pub who was very troubled by the implications of Ireland's impending union with Europe - on the one hand, he thought it would present opportunities for his children that he had never dreamed of, on the other hand, he feared that Ireland would lose a lot of its character and distinctiveness. I thought about him all day. At least in Dublin, I think he was right on both counts. The other big change is that there were Englishmen everywhere - ten years ago, Londoners would look incredulous when I told them I was going to Dublin - why would anyone want to go to Dublin? - now it's become a hotspot, especially for "hen parties" (these are new to me too - we saw them in Belfast as well - a dozen or so women out for a night on the town). .
We wandered around St. Patrick's Cathedral (where Jonathan Swift worked most of his career), and then off to Trinity University where we went through the Book of Kells exhibit. I've always missed this one way or the other - it was closed for security reasons on one of my trips, and closed because the students were sitting exams on another. It's a fabulous exhibit - a couple of rooms that provide context and show how manuscripts were made, then a small darkened room where two volumes are on display - one open to a page of text, one to a full-page illustration - alongside two other books from the time. The highlight of the tour was our exit through the Library's Long Room, a vast hall that holds 200,000 books - the place had the smell of a fabulous reading room, and the books were shelved twenty feet up the walls in nooks laid down both sides of the room.
We walked down the Liffey almost to the sea - I don't ever remember seeing so many construction cranes in one place - Dublin will undoubtedly be another place altogether the next time I see it.
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