Oh Danny Boy

I want to go back to Ireland! I had a fantastic three days in Dublin. Flying in, we could see the beautiful coast, but I only spent time in the city. It’s a very compact city, though, nothing like London. From the top of the Guiness Factory (the seventh floor) we had a panoramic view of the city all the way to the mountains that surround it. It’s a beautiful country. I want to go back and spend more time, both in Dublin and other places. I want to go to Connemara and Galway and the spend time in the Aran Islands listening to people speak Gaelic. It’s a really beautiful language, just from the little bit I heard in Dublin. A few people in our group spent our “free day” at Howth, a seaside town not faraway. But there was enough to do in Dublin itself to keep me so busy that I am still tired! We saw an excellent Yeats exhibit at the National Library, and a whole lot of places that had literary significance. It seems that everytime we turned around there was another building or street or statue from a Joyce novel. There are wonderful statues all over Dublin dedicated to the writers- Joyce, Kavanagh, Oscar Wilde, etc. The other thing we did that was relevant to our class material was tour the Kilmanhain Jail. It has a lot of history, but its biggest significance, and what was relevant to our course, was that it was the site where the rebels of the Easter 1916 Uprising were held and executed. I learned a lot in just an hour of touring it. Besides all that, we saw other interesting things, like the National Museum. Not only did they have rooms upon rooms of Bronze Age jewelery and Viking treasures, but they had a whole exhibit on the peat bog bodies. They are bodies that have been preserved in peat bogs and they are both grotesque and fascinating. Speaking of grotesque, I tried my first Guiness on this trip. I couldn’t finish my first pint- I suffered through about half of it and then two other people finished it for me. Everyone was enjoying my experience. But even though I don’t like beer, I still could enjoy the brewery tour, especially the view from the top I just told you about. We took a “literary pub tour” that took us around to four different pubs Saturday night, and the actor and actress leading our tour acted out scenes from famous Irish works. It was really well done. If anyone understands Waiting for Godot, let me know, because that was the second time I’ve seen it AND we read it this week and I still don’t understand what it’s all supposed to mean in the end.
My friends and I spent Sunday afternoon doing a little bit of shopping (something I haven’t done in Paris or London) and walking around Dublin. It was very relaxing to not feel like we were rushing around sightseeing. The people we encountered in the pubs in Dublin were very friendly, and I intend to go back.
But what was the highlight of my trip? Actually, there are two. The first is comical, the other is academically astute.
We saw the spot where Handel’s Messiah was first performed. It’s now a luxury hotel, but there is a nice memorial plaque outside of it. On that street corner in Dublin, one of the ASE staff who accompanied us and our tutor to Dublin started singing the Messiah. Not humming, or even shouting the Hallelujah chorus, but BELTING in his (very good) tenor voice, parts of the Messiah I wouldn’t recognize just having seen it all the way through once. And as he keeps singing, he’s looking around and making hand gestures as though we should all join in. I was sorry that we were so disappointing to him, but who other than Andrew Butterworth (a man of mysterious talents) can just start in the middle of Handel’s Messiah? So finally he stopped and got us all to sing the hallelujah chorus, and we obliged him so we could move on.

And the other highlight was Trinity College, where they have the Book of Kells. I saw pages from the Book of Kells up close, under glass, beautifully illuminated. The exhibit went in depth as to how the book was made, too. The library above it had many other manuscripts from more contemporary times, including the FIRST EVER PRINTED COPY of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Yeah. 1472, or something like that. Not the year he wrote it, of course, but the year it was ever printed rather than copied. Still impressive, I thought.

So that's it. Oh, and maybe I'll look into what kind of graduate programs I could do at Trinity College. But only after I've gone back to Ireland and can base that decision on more than three days.