A Dose of Dublin, Part Two of Four

First, some sidenotes: There's a huge general election coming up in Ireland in the next couple weeks--one of my professors, who's in her sixties, said she expected this to be the most important and interesting election of her lifetime--so Dublin was completely plastered with campaign posters. I counted at least five different parties, some of them embellished with amusing graffiti. Also, Dublin was hosting a very important Ireland v. France rugby match on Sunday, so tons of people--specifically tons of French people--had poured into the city to see it. We had breakfast at the hostel with a group of middle-aged French guys who, according to Emilie, made immature jokes the whole time. And everywhere we went, we kept hearing people speaking French. ALSO, to our amazement, the weather for the next three days was unusually sunny and spring-y (if we don't factor temperature into calculations of spring-y-ness). I kept wanting to take pictures of the sky to prove it could be that clear here.

I think that sets the scene properly. Moving on...

Our first stop on Day 2 was the National Gallery, where three or four centuries of Irish (and English--shhh) art were available for our (free!!) viewing pleasure. I'm not much of an art connoisseur, but I really enjoyed wandering through the chronologically organized rooms. First there were portraits and landscapes, which I found inexplicably fascinating--mainly because the really good ones are lifelike enough for me to imagine what it would've been like to see these people in the flesh or see these places in person. We're always saying how photographs can't do justice to real life, and neither can paintings, of course, but I'm constantly amazed by how much they do manage to capture--and to think that someone started with a blank canvas and managed to create an image that looks real, a guy that looks like he could sneeze at any second, or water that literally seems to be reflecting its surroundings--is just incredible to me. Of course I got a little more leery as we progressed into the more avant-garde eras. I like realism. I don't find it boring. I'm not crazy about random shapes. But I couldn't help liking Yeats (Jack Yeats, brother of William Butler "I can't actually write dialogue for normal people so I'll have Lady Gregory write it for me and take the credit" Yeats)...his paintings managed to evoke moods and emotions even though they got more and more abstract as he got older. Plus the colors were just pretty.

Next we moved on the history/archeology branch of the National Museum (also free!). Highlights included...

--a 5000-year-old gold jewelry that any celebrity would kill for (imagine the red carpet interview: "And where'd you get the jewelry?" "Oh, just an ancient Celtic hoard, you know, it was buried in the third century BC to keep it safe. And the dress is Victor & Rolf.")

--items that had been preserved in bogs for hundreds and even thousands of years, including clothing and tools from medieval times all the way up through the 1800s, the frothy remnants of butter (which people used to store in bogs to keep it from going bad), and  human corpses from the Iron Age in various degrees of completeness (one upper body, including displeased face and fancy hairdo; one lower body with very buff arms, etc)

--objects from the everyday lives of medieval Irish nobles (with the Fitzgeralds and Butlers making yet another cameo)

--and much, much more! (Just ask Rick Steves)

After a quick lunch break, we checked out St Stephen's Green, which happened to be right by our hostel. 'Twas lovely, and--thanks to the unusually mild weather--packed with adorable children, snogging couples, and swans. Oh, and statues. Lots of statues of republican martyrs.

Me: Ah, Robert Emmet. (takes out camera) 

Emilie: Who's he?

Me: I have no idea. I'll google him when we get home. (snaps picture)

Robert Emmet, by the way, was quite a fascinating fellow. Tried to start a rebellion in 1803 with two of his friends. Guess how that turned out.

My favorite part of the day was our stop at the Georgian House at Number 29 Fitzwilliam Street--my personal addition to our itinerary.

Erell: What's special about this house?

Me: (with look of despair) It's just...old...

It was built in 1794, as a matter of fact, as part of a new wave of upper-middle-class houses sprouting up on what were then the outskirts of the city (not that far from the poorest section of Dublin, ironically). For just two euros, we were treated to an entertaining video about the house's background and its broader historical context (narrated by the ghost of Olivia Beatty, the original owner) plus a tour of the house that gave us a step-by-step overview of what it was like to live there in the late 18th century. Claudia was deeply opposed to time travel by the end; once she found out that women slept sitting up in bed to avoid tussling their hair, which they washed once or twice every six weeks in the hope of attracting a husband so that they wouldn't have to become governesses and spend the rest of their lives sewing and teaching rich children grammar...it was understandably a turnoff. But SO INTERESTING. (I was relieved that the others thought so too, or I would've felt guilty about dragging them along on such a nerdy quest.)

On the way home we stopped long enough to take a token picture of the Oscar Wilde House, which is basically a house with an "Oscar Wilde was here" plaque. Then we reunited with Katherine and her roomies for dinner, but of course it had slipped our minds that A) It's Dublin, B) There were a ton of people in town for the rugby match, and C) It's Dublin....e.g., we should've made reservations. After a few no-goes, we managed to get into a restaurant, and then we decided to venture to Temple Bar, hub of Dublin nightlife and a prime example of why no one ever got an Irish temperance movement off the ground. See the aforementioned conditions for an explanation of why we only stayed there long enough to take a picture and get beer spilled on us. 

So we got home at a reasonable hour, which was a good thing, because we had a full agenda for the next day....