Instead, we decided to limit our hard stop commitments to two -- the "Guinness Experience" and the Book of Kell's tour at Trinity College. This would give us plenty of time to wander the city streets, giving me many opportunities to take off my jacket, put it back on, take off my sunglasses, put them back on, wonder if I should've worn long pants instead of shorts, congratulate myself for being so savvy as to wear shorts, etc. As discussed in these pages earlier, if you don't like the weather in Ireland, just wait a few minutes. It will change.
There were a few things I wanted to see. All of them were either weird, arcane, or weird and arcane. First, I wanted to see the spot where Glen Hansard is busking in the opening scenes of Once, a great Irish movie that nobody seems to talk about around here, so busy are they commemorating the time John Wayne filmed The Quiet Man in Dingle. The spot was at 62 Grafton Street, in the middle of a pedestrian shopping mall and a block from Bewleys, where excellent scones and a stellar European bathroom experience (two Dyson dryers) can be had either dining in or for takeaway. The white chocolate hot chocolate, though, was a bit much even for me.
Unfortunately, like most of the weird and arcane sights I seek (except the Billy the Kid grave; that was cool), the spot where Hansard busked was difficult to find and an anti-climax. I've only seen the movie once, but I don't remember him busking in front of a Disney store.
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| Hugely deserved statue. |
Even more weird and arcane but not one bit of a disappointment was the statue of Phil Lynott, founding member and primary songwriter of Thin Lizzy. I am presently searching Thin Lizzy on Apple Music to see if I've actually heard any Thin Lizzy tracks. Don't let my ignorance diminish the magnificence of the Phil Lynott statue, one block off of Grafton Street. There he is in peak mid-1970s glory, axe by his side, weird Irish afro reaching toward the sky.
Jailbreak and The Boys are Back in Town. So I do know a couple of Thin Lizzy tracks. Also, you can buy a small replica of the statue here.
Our traveling party understood that if my weird and arcane desires were met early, the rest of the day would be left open for more generally rewarding pursuits, the kind you can actually post on Instagram without your friends responding with either sarcastic comments or complete befuddlement. From Phil we went on to St. Stephen's Green, a lovely (note assimilated use of Irish slang) green space that, per placards distributed throughout the park, was an important site during the 1916 Easter Uprising, during which Irish citizen rebels occupied the park (and the supervisor's house, scaring the bejeesus out of his daughter by threatening to blow the place up and then setting up snipers in the upstairs windows) and even a pub on a street nearby. I came to Ireland completely ignorant of Irish history. Now I know about 0.005 percent of it but am eager to learn more.
The great thing about St. Stephen's Green is that it is located on the outside border of the Georgian District (I'm getting the name wrong but don't have enough time or wifi power to research), where Princess Grace hoped to find all of those whimsical painted doors she read about while looking for things to do in Dublin. Alas, we walked and walked (and walked) and saw some beautiful brick buildings (mostly used now as offices for solicitors and tech start-ups) and maybe a few bold door statements -- a red one here, a light blue one there -- but nothing close to the core of door after stunning door we'd been led to expect. After about a half-hour, we all agreed it was time to move on.
The next goal was to see Christ Church, one of Dublin's many significant churches. I swear, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a church in this town. Most of the larger ones, including St. Patrick's, ask a cover charge of anyone who wants to go inside and view their treasures. We were satisfied looking from the outside.
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| Texting, not navigating. |
On and on we walked, our ultimate goal the Guinness Experience in St. James Gate. Navigation superiority became a fluid thing, passed back and forth between Princess Grace and Sandra Bullock. Don't let the photo to the right fool you; O'Toole is texting, not mapping, having stated sotto voce to me that he had "no interest in navigating," certainly not after he voiced his desire to "go see the Dublin Castle" only to be abjectly ignored by our twin leaders.
We did end up seeing the castle, which, frankly, was a mess. Built during medieval times and finally and triumphantly turned over to the new Irish government led by Michael Collins, who I can only picture as Liam Neeson but probably wasn't 6'4", it's a weird hodgepodge of eras, of towers and halls, stones and stucco, gray and colors and all but demanded eight EU to anyone wishing to go inside. We demurred. An unimpressed Princess Grace ("You could go to
Philadelphia and see things older than this") and Google offered an exterior tour for five, a much better deal.
Dublin continued to impersonate Boston, Massachusetts. At one point, walking down a street of bow-fronted brick buildings outside St. Stephen's, I announced brazenly, "If you told me that was the Boston Common, I wouldn't argue," drawing a few puzzled looks and eventual nods from passers-by.
REAL-TIME UPDATE: We are now halfway through Apple's "Thin Lizzy Essentials" playlist. Still only two songs I recognize.
After walking around the outside of a few more churches and through "not a really nice" neighborhood, we arrived at the Guinness Storehouse in St. James Gate, along with everyone else visiting Dublin today. We were all a bit skeptical of this spectacle, had been all along, but so many locals and expatriate Dubliners had sincerely recommended it to us that we were swayed.
As a veteran of many brewery and distillery tours, almost enough to now actually understand how beer and spirits are made, I can honestly say that Guinness is a better or
worse experience, but it certainly is different. For starters, nothing you see looks like its anywhere near a place where they make beer. There are purple lights, interactive displays, videos, restored old fermenters and barrels. There, under glass, is the 9,000-year lease (you heard that correctly) signed by Arthur Guinness upon moving into the St. James factory in 1759. Does the same landlord still own it? If not, is the lease still valid? It's still got some 8,739 years left on it.
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| Not your average brewery tour, clearly. |
It took a almost an hour for all of us to succumb to museum face. By the time we got in line for the tasting experience, we were wearing matching thousand-yard stares, mine interrupted briefly as we marched down a darkened corridor toward the promised "tasting room." "What if this is like Soylent Green?" I wondered, but kept walking. I'm pleased to say it wasn't, and we all survived. In fact, at the other end of the corridor was a cool white room like the one Willy Wonka employed to test out Wonkavision and then another room that seemed lifted from the Haunted Mansion. All of this for two ounces of Guinness "that you're supposed to gulp, not sip."
There were two more floors, including the "Guinness Academy," where people who aren't us can stand in line for the opportunity to learn how to correctly pour a glass of Guinness. We skipped that and went to the seventh floor to claim our free pints. The seventh floor, which offers a 270-degree view of Dublin through floor-to-ceiling windows (like a lesser version of that place we went to in London several years ago... or at the beginning of this trip.), was mobbed. Views were at a premium. We lucked out, though. A family arose from one of the few tables just as we settled in a few feet away. We stood there gulping our beer, then actually TOOK our beers downstairs to the gift shop, because if you can't enjoy your Guinness wherever you want at the Guinness Experience (maybe not it's official name, but it should be), something's not right.
REAL-TIME UPDATE: I didn't make it through the Thin Lizzy playlist. Statue's still really cool, though.
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| Pretty cool. |
The plan after that was to walk through the intermittent rain to Trinity College for the Book of Kell's, but a majority of our group was done with walking so we too a cab, hung out at the hotel and walked over to Trinity, where several hundred people also wanted to see the Book of Kells. We donned our earphone things and dove in, learning about 8th-century monks and pigments and leather bindings and the four gospels. I was feeling another bout of museum face coming on when -- wham! -- there it was: the Book of Kells. Over 1,000 years old with steadfast colors as brilliant as they were the day whatever 18-year-old monk/scribe (who, we learned, was prone to writing things like "Am I ever going to be done with this?" in the margins) etched it with his goose quill.
Truly stunning, but for me the highlight of the Kell's tour was the Long Room upstairs, a 200,000-volume library housed in what was Ireland's largest room/hall when it was built in 1712. Imagine joining 400 teenage Italian tourists in a room where Samuel Beckett did his homework? I inhaled the ancient book dust over and over, tried to read the titles on the ancient spines, looked at pictures of Beckett and Brendan Kennelly, wondered what happens if a kid at Trinity needs a book from the Long Room for a project. Does he just push a few tourists out of the way and grab what he needs? Is the library only open at night?
Travel is all about the questions.
Here are today's one-day-only numbers:
9 -- buses parked on the street outside Merrion Square but eerily, no tourists.
8 -- total number of weeks Thin Lizzy's four biggest hit singles spent in the UK top ten.
1 -- Star Wars movies filmed in the Long Room at Trinity College.
2 -- number of times we have heard U2 played since we got to Ireland. The second was today, blasting over the speakers at the Guinness gift shop, which kind of makes sense.
less than 150 -- total square feet in our room at the Temple Bar Inn.
0 -- donuts consumed by either Sandra Bullock or me, despite threatening to march right in a buy one every time we pass a donut store, and the Irish, per my wife, "really seem to love their donuts.
Today was our last day in Dublin, our only full day, and we chased it with gusto. Tomorrow, Peter O'Toole and Princess Grace return to the U.S. Sandra Bullock and I move on to England for one more week of travel, diminished a bit by losing our travel partners but determined to log our 20,000 steps, drink our afternoon gin and tonics and push this thing all the way until we get back on the plane at Heathrow on the 23rd.
Dinner is in 12 minutes. This is a first draft. Sorry for the typos.
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