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After having made something of a meal of the first few hours of our stay, it seems that the events of the second entire day can be summarised quite simply.
We had breakfast and then headed down Grafton Street to Trinity College where we went to see the book of Kells. This book is notable not because it is about the Kell Dragon from the second Star Wars film, but more because it is a very old book. It's an illustrated bible. I'd seen it before and was happy to see it again. Admittedly, I have no memory of what's so special about it, but I'm sure it's worth a look if you're even in the Dublin area. I remember being more impressed at the library which you end up walking through after you've seen the book. It's quite a sight with a long stretch of very high shelves - it has the look of a proper seat of learning. You could even imagine Indiana Jones finding a secret passage in it, that leads to a sewer full of artefacts and rats.
Back up Grafton Street we found St Stephen's Shopping centre, something I remember from my first ever trip to Dublin (before I'd even met Caroline) and we must have mooched around there until we tired of its countless shops (well, handful). Then it was time for Caroline to have a rest. Fair enough, it was her weekend and I had a mission of my own to achieve.
I set out to find a pad on which to record the story so far. I clearly achieved this goal, since there were notes taken, enough to make the last few pages of this drivel flow easily. Rather than play on the tension of will-he-won't-he-get-the-pad, I'll simply recap on some of the details of what I saw on the way to the combination newsagent/delicatessen (yes, I know it's an odd combination, but it's common in Ireland) where the pad was discovered and bought. I found that Grafton street is busker central. Of all the myriad performers, only three stuck out enough to be recorded for posterity:
The man with the broken neck - well, it least his head was pretty much at right angles to where you and I would put ours. However, he sang, quietly and cautiously (I suppose he didn't want to dislodge it further) and this was memorable, though not worth any of my euros.
The grunge guitarist playing to an audience of three - quite self-explanatory. I can picture one guy with three black-stud wearing teenagers engrossed in his musical machinations and everyone else pretty much ignoring him. Call it fringe-performance.
The lusty lad - this young kid, no more than 12, was singing a range of songs in the same "hearty young lad" Irish brogue. Every song sounded the same, and his choices of songs would be hilarious if someone gave them his treatment for a laugh on stage. But the lad was earnest, so if he wants to sing Celine Dion in public like that, then I say let him.
After reaching the hotel and scribbling furiously in my pad for a while, the rest period was over and it was time to explore some more. The next port of call was the Natural History Museum, or Dead Zoo as it is also called. This place as the advantage of being free to enter, which is, all things being equal, probably for the best. As I reckon you can tell the quality of a place by its grouting, so I believe you can also tell the quality of a building by the relationship of skirting board to wall. I like to think of them as being a continuum. This was not really anything like the case in this particular building. I know things warp, but that's why god gave us filler.
Perhaps such buildings are hard to maintain, especially if you don't have much of a building restoration budget. I suspect that this place didn't get much financial support. As a Natural History Museum, it seems rather impoverished. Most of its exhibits are, essentially, stuffed animals. Many of them are stuffed heads of animals. It's almost like the entire place had been filled by a hunter who had run out of space to put up his hunting trophies. Essentially it was a rather unpleasant room full of corpses. Incidentally, I visited it a year later and found it to be no less unpleasant.
Escaping the nasty building, we eventually took ourselves out for a very nice meal at a place called Pier 32. For some reason, I believe this restaurant to be located in the legal district of Dublin, an area a lot more familiar to Caroline now, since she's worked in the locale. I forget the specific nature of the meal, but I read from my notes that we navigated the street-beggars and returned to our swanky hotel, used its revolving door with ease and retired for the night.
17 May 2004
Ashley Frieze