A few days in Dublin

Dublin was a fun city to visit. For me, the highlights were a couple of places: Trinity College and the Book of Kells and the Guinness storehouse. I had mixed feelings about Temple Bar (the nightlife part of town), but if you're a tourist, you kind of have an obligation to go see it.

You can't miss the Liffey River, which runs through the center of Dublin. But try to check out the different bridges that cross it. My favorites were the James Joyce bridge (the newest) and the Ha'penny bridge (don't know what happened to the "lf").

Quick Tips:

Having decided on Dublin at the last minute, and being generally averse to planning anything, I was not particularly well-prepared. I suggest at least some preparation before arriving. Nevertheless, there is still plenty to see by just walking around.

One of the things I should have done was purchase a 3-day city pass for the bus. This includes unlimited use of the bus system, as well as the hop-on/hop-off city bus tour, which takes about an hour and is worth doing.

Plan for the weather. I happened to be there during an unseasonably cold spell. It also tends to rain a fair bit.

Have a map on your person at all times. Don't go wandering off and assume that you know where you are. Trust me.

Best Way To Get Around:

The first day in Dublin was the most dangerous. For that entire day, I was unable to grasp the concept of cars driving on the opposite sides of the road. Numerous times, I almost stepped right in front of a speeding car, because apparently I am past the age where I am able to learn new things.

If you are able to master the traffic thing, walking is a great way to get around Dublin. It's a small and compact city, and there's plenty to see wherever you're walking. However, you might want to bring an umbrella, as the weather can change quickly.

I used the bus quite a bit, and found that useful. Taxis are available -- sometimes -- but I found them to be expensive. I bought a ticket on one of those hop-on/hop-off bus tours, which proved very useful for getting to the places I wanted to see and was valid for 24 hours.

As I booked my trip at the last minute, and this was the only hotel available, I wasn't expecting much. But I was pleasantly surprised. First off, they picked me up at the airport and let me check in at 9:00 in the morning, after having been travelling for about 18 hours. I was so relieved at that that I would have forgiven an inadequate room. But the room was great. I wouldn't call it big, but it was certainly big enough for me. Most importantly, it was comfortable.

The hotel appears to be fairly new, and there were either expansions or new hotels going up on either side of it when I was there. Across the street is a park that seemed nice, although I didn’t venture too far into it.

The hotel’s restaurant seemed too pricey for me so I didn't eat there. But it also has a nice bar, which proved valuable my first night there. This was the night the power went out (for the area, I was told, not just the hotel). On emergency power, the lights were dim, but the Guinness taps were unaffected. It took a little longer to get your drink, though, since the bar was pretty busy with hotel patrons locked out of their rooms, and the bartenders had to calculate your bill by hand.

My main concern with this hotel before I arrived had been the location – near the airport, not in the city. I needed to get to the city every day and did not rent a car. This turned out to be a legitimate concern. But the front desk staff provided me with a useful map of Dublin, with instructions on how to get to and from the hotel on the buses. That information proved to be very useful later in the trip (see my Temple Bar entry). The bus stops just down the road from the hotel. It costs €1.50, and takes you to the heart of Dublin in about half an hour. I took a taxi once, which didn’t seem to save much time, and cost about €16. It was actually nice to take the bus's meandering route into town, just to see some residential parts of Dublin that I otherwise would have missed.

All in all, I really liked this place -- it was a great hotel, especially for what I paid for it (as a Travelocity last-minute package). I slept well.

My impression of Dubliners is that they are mostly proud of two names: James Joyce and Guinness. While reading Ulysses may not be essential to enjoying Dublin, having a Guinness is -- whether you like the stuff or not. And a great way to do that is by visiting the Guinness storehouse, which has been turned into a museum celebrating the history of Guinness.

The self-guided tour is actually interesting and entertaining. There is a fascinating old video of the process of making barrels; an exhibit on the logistics of shipping vast quantities of Guinness; and perhaps most entertaining of all, an exhibit on some of Guinness's famous advertising campaigns. You also have the option to learn the proper way to pour a Guinness (and to get a certificate proclaiming your prowess).

The tour finishes in the Gravity Bar, which takes up the top floor of the building. This place is worth visiting for the view of Dublin alone. But it is also worth visiting because you get a complimentary pint of Guinness with your museum admission. If you really don't like Guinness, you can try what my bus driver suggested: ask the bartender to add some blackcurrant. I did not do this, because I am a man. And I'm glad I didn't: somehow the Guinness I had there just tasted better than it ever had before. And that's pretty good.

The bus stops there, as do both of the Dublin bus tours. You get a discount on admission if you come on the city bus tour, after which the price is €12.60. Give yourself some time to enjoy it. The museum is apparently going to be redesigned, starting in January 2006. But don't worry about it going anywhere: the Guinness family has a 9,000 year lease on the land!

Ah, Temple Bar. First off, let's make this clear: Temple Bar is not an actual bar. Well, it is, but when Dubliners refer to "Temple Bar," they actually mean an area of the city, that just happens to have a lot of bars in it. Temple Bar is actually a street (and, in fact, "bar" in this archaic sense describes a street near a river or some such thing).

Based on what I had read about Temple Bar before I arrived in Dublin, I imagined it as a sort of European Vegas: a hedonistic refuge for those looking to get drunk and crazy and damn the consequences. I had also heard that it was a popular destination for English bachelor/bachelorette parties. This turned out to be remarkably accurate -- bachelor/ette parties were everywhere, and most of the people (or at least, the loudest people) were English.

I was not all that eager to hang out with these people, so I set off in search of a pub playing live Irish music. This was not as easy as I had hoped it would be. Apparently only tourists listen to Irish music. Plenty of places advertised “live Irish music nightly”. But covers of Van Morrison, U2, and – I don’t know why – John Denver, by one guy with a guitar, are not exactly what I had in mind.

After spending a great deal of time looking for an Irish music pub, I finally decided to give in and try to enjoy Temple Bar for what it was. So first I checked out Temple Bar – the actual bar of that name. It was packed, with English and Americans. I didn’t stay long. Next I tried a place called Turk’s Head, which was also pretty packed, and which I didn’t care for because it made me feel old. Stupid kids. After this I crossed the Liffey and ended up in a place called Zanzibar, which was a little less crowded, though still busy, and seemed more my style. At first. Ultimately it was too loud and I just didn’t care for it. I wouldn’t recommend any of these places. Not to myself, at least.

A word of caution: at 2am in Dublin on a Saturday night, finding a taxi is not easy. They are everywhere, but so is the competition to get one. In fact after an hour of trying, I was still standing in the cold. Eventually I discovered, to my tremendous relief, that the city bus that went past my hotel was still running. This is why I am very pro-Dublin bus.

Oh, and in the end I did find some Irish music -- just a few songs, mind you, mixed with some other stuff, but better than nothing.

This is the largest Gothic cathedral in Ireland (incidentally, why does it seem that every cathedral I visit bills itself as the "largest cathedral in ..."?). It looks like any other Gothic cathedral, though. I should just accept that I don't have the expertise to tell these things apart and stop visiting them.

But then I would never have seen the burial place of Jonathan Swift, Dublin-born author of Gulliver's Travels and generally witty fellow. He was the man in charge at this cathedral for a while. He also wrote, I learned here, that "no man is thoroughly miserable unless he be condemned to live in Ireland".

I would also not have seen a copy of Handel's Messiah, used in its first-ever performance (which took place elsewhere in Dublin, but which featured members of the St. Patrick's Cathedral choir).

And I would not have seen a door with a section hacked out of it, and read the story of two warring Dublin families who reached a truce in their fighting when one man chopped a hole in the door that he had barricaded himself behind and stuck out his arm as a gesture of good faith.

Granted, it would not have been tragic to miss out on some of this. But all in all it was kind of interesting. Cathedrals in the middle of modern cities don't impress the way they once must have. I still find them interesting because I don't understand how they stay up for so long. It costs €4.50 to get in and see this one.

Apparently the Irish make films too. I've seen The Commitments, which I assume must have been Irish, but I don't know what they've been up to since then. So I went to the Irish Film Institute to see what they had to offer. They had a French film festival going on at the time, but fortunately were also showing a recent Irish film, which I went to see.

The film was called Pavee Lackeen, and I won't bore you with the details, because I didn't understand them. It was an Irish film, though, and was actually kind of interesting, despite the fact that nothing really happened.

But the film centre itself is the interesting part. It had two theatres, showing different films. The one I was in was smallish, but really a decent size for an independent film centre. It filled up quickly, and judging by the crowd in the lobby when I left, so did the other theatre.

There is a café available, serving food and Guinness (and other beers too, I'm sure), and it seemed like a nice place to go even if you weren't going to a movie. Also inside is a library with plenty of books on movies.

Trinity College is the oldest university in Ireland and among the older ones in Europe. One of the virtues of being founded so early (1592) is that you get to claim a prime spot in the heart of the city. And Trinity College is right in the middle of things, its large green spaces protected from the bustle of central Dublin by buildings dating as far back as 1712.

That's all well and good, but the reason most casual visitors stop by this place is the Book of Kells, an elaborately illustrated Latin translation of the four gospels of the New Testament. Unfortunately, you're not allowed to take pictures of it. And since they only display two pages at a time -- one of illustrations, and another of text -- you're not going to be able to see the whole thing. They do change the pages that are on display regularly.

Before you reach the book, you walk through an exhibit on its history. This was pretty interesting. It described the processes that would have been involved back then in making a book like this, such as the kind of materials used and how these were acquired. One of the inks, for instance, came from lapis lazuli, whose only known source at the time was a mine in Afghanistan. It also talks about who wrote the book and where it has been over the years.

But why look at just one book when you can see thousands. After you emerge from the Book of Kells viewing area, you come to the old library of Trinity College. Stacks and stacks of old books, piled to the ceiling. It made me wonder, how did anybody ever find anything before Google?

Also on display at the library is the oldest harp in Ireland, which is apparently the model for the Guinness logo. You can't play it, though. There are model harps in the gift shop that you can play. But be careful, they are easily and noisily knocked over.

At first I thought this place was like Dublin's Central Park. But it turns out Dublin already has a park fit for that honor: the largest city park in Europe, apparently, is in northwest Dublin. St. Stephen's Green is a smallish park, taking up just a few blocks of the city. It's too small for running, but just right for strolling. So that's just what I did.

The leaves had mostly fallen from the trees, but the grass was still green in late November. It's a park -- pond, ducks, fountain, footbridges. And a few statues. That sums it up. Like just about everything else in Dublin that has been around for a while, it has been written about by James Joyce. It also seems to be a desirable location -- the poshest shops and hotels are to be found extending along the roads surrounding St. Stephen's Green. Grafton street, which leads out from the northwest corner of the park, seems to have been the main shopping road in the city. I just happened to be there at the onset of the Christmas shopping season, so it was stuffed with shoppers.

All in all, it is a pretty park and worth a visit.