DUBLIN, IRELAND

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June 2017

THE wanderer spent her first weekend in Ireland in its capital city, Dublin. That weekend a Pride celebration just so happened to be taking place, and so the city was decked in rainbows.
After a brief tour of some of the city, the wanderer found herself in the Leprechaun Museum. Going through doors and tunnels that felt like they belonged in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, the wanderer made her way through a variety of interesting rooms, including a giant's room (where all of the furniture was huge and you could climb up onto the giant chairs), a room with a cool digital map of Ireland, a model of the inside of an old Irish cottage, a fake wood with a well standing in the middle of it, and so on. The guide---or storyteller, as he dubbed himself---meantime informed everyone about Irish fairy tales and legends, referring to much the wanderer herself had grown familiar with in her weeks before coming to Ireland (mostly courtesy of W. B. Yeats's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry). He also hearkened back to the tradition of oral storytelling and told two wonderful stories, the first about a leprechaun who worked as a spy for a king and was unsuccessfully murdered by the other servants, who were duly punished for trying to kill the king's special little spy (two of the servants even died at the hands of a magic lie-detecting clam shell), and the other about a man who one day encounters a deer in the woods, discovers the deer is actually a human woman, marries her, then the evil fairy who cursed the woman turned her back into a deer and she was never found again, but then one the man finds a wild child in the woods and comes to the conclusion that the boy was the deer woman's son, his own son, and happy ending.
Then the wanderer was taken to the Guinness factory, which of course wasn't nearly as entertaining or enchanting as the Leprechaun Museum. But she got to watch some Irish dancing and drumming and try a free sample of some kind of bitter-tasting Guinness (which she was definitely not a fan of) and got a bird's-eye view of Dublin from the top of the factory. Then a horse-drawn carriage took the wanderer to a "Viking Splash" tour, which was filled with many Viking roars, a fun  bearded tour guide who was father to a "big-headed baby," and a bus that turned into a boat, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang style.
After a delicious delicious dinner of a vegetarian chili "boxty" (basically a potato pancake) burrito, the girl and her companions spent the remainder of the night at a lovely pub, where they sat upstairs in a wonderful candlelit nook and the wanderer, rather than drinking, took volumes off of the bookshelf behind her and unsuccessfully attempted to read them (they were all, oddly, in French!) when she wasn't chatting with or listening to her companions and the other friendly patrons of the bar.

THE next day saw the wanderer visiting Kilmainham Jail, the Book of Kells and the library at Trinity College, the "bog bodies"---human corpses preserved by Irish bogs---at the National Museum, and Phoenix Park. It feels like she saw a bit of everything in Dublin.
She was very glad she was able to visit Ireland's capital city.
But she was also very glad to return to Galway, which, though a city, managed to, unlike Dublin, retain a small-town feel. Dublin felt incredibly urban compared to Galway, and the wanderer has always been a country girl at heart. But, nevertheless, she vastly enjoyed her stay in colorful Dublin.





















































Comments

  1. Sarah PenningtonJuly 3, 2017 at 4:42 PM

    All I have to say is: that looks like a magnificent library.

    ReplyDelete

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