Dublin was awesome. I’ll just get that out of the way right now, and plunge right into the story.

Dublin is the capital and largest city in Ireland, situated on the east coast. We were there for a 4 day excursion, from Thursday to Sunday.

We got up early on Thursday. And by early, I mean we were on the road by 7:30, which is an absolutely unholy hour for us college kids to be awake. It was worth it though, for two reasons: we got to Dublin faster, and we got to see the sunrise.

There was a light rain falling that morning, but it was clear on the eastern horizon. So when the sun rose, it lit up the entire sky, setting the thick, low clouds in red light. In the west, a full, unbroken rainbow stretched from horizon to horizon. I had never seen a rainbow in the morning before, and combined with the sunrise and the rain, the effect was incredible.

We didn’t have time to chase down leprechauns or pots of gold, though. We drove straight through to Dublin, and stopped at Kilmanheim Jail.

Kilmanheim Jail was built in the 18^th century, and was in use into the early 20^th century. It’s most famous for being the site where the 16 revolutionaries of the Easter Uprising were held and executed. It was a very interesting tour. You could see where the jail had been built in two different styles; the first was the low, dark cells of the 18^th century, the second was the open, circular style of the Victorian era.

Some of you may recognize this facility from the film The Italian Job. If you do, you watch too many movies.

After Kilmainham, we were free to move about Dublin. A few of us went to Burdock’s Fish and Chips, the best fish and chips in Ireland. It’s an unassuming little place; everything is take-out, there’s nowhere to sit down. On the wall is a poster with the names of all the famous people who have eaten there. And yes, it was delicious.

After we’d been fed, we went to the Guinness Brewery. (We hadn’t even been free in Dublin for 2 hours, and we went to the brewery… what good college students we are.) It was a very good tour. You don’t go into the brewery itself, of course, but you go through separate exhibits that explain the history and the process. It wasn’t very in-depth, but it was aesthetically very impressive. And at the end, you go up to the Gravity Bar on top of the Brewery. The Gravity Bar is a round room with glass walls set on top of the Guinness Brewery. Since the Brewery is the biggest building in Dublin, you have a fantastic view of the city.

The Gravity Bar on top of the Guinness Brewery had a 360 degree view of Dublin... and of course, the best Guinness in the world.

As an added bonus, you get a free pint of Guinness for completing the tour. And this isn’t an ordinary pint of Guinness. This is straight out of the brewery; the best Guinness in the world. It was also my first. I enjoyed it, but unfortunately now I have to face the fact that every Guinness I drink from now on will be worse than that one. Oh well.

After we were done with our beer, a group of us decided to go see a play. The only one that we could get into at the Abbey Theatre was Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days”. The play was a surreal thing about a woman who is buried up to her waist in the ground. It was very well done, and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t really what I’d been looking to see. But later we IMDB’d the woman who performed it, and she turned out to be Petunia Dursley, from the Harry Potter movies! So that’s pretty cool.

The next morning, we got back on the bus and drove to Tara, the ruling place of the old High Kings of Ireland.

Visiting Tara sounded cool in theory, but in practice it was actually pretty unimpressive. There was nothing left of the place, just the remnants of the trenches on the green hills, and the visitor’s center was closed for the season, so we couldn’t learn about the history of the place

You can see the rolling hills in the background here. Those aren't natural; they're trenches that were dug to hinder attackers.

One of the peculiarities of herding Irish cattle is that the ranchers allow their cattle to roam free on important cultural sites. They can’t hurt them, and Ireland has so many cultural sites that if the sheep couldn’t eat on them, they probably would starve to death. Anyway, Tara had a small herd of sheep on it, and they were actually more interesting than Tara itself (which doesn’t speak well for Tara). Sheep can run pretty fast, if you work them up to a stampede.

After we were done playing with the sheep, we went to Knowth. Knowth is the site of a megalithic tomb, the most impressive one we’d seen yet.

It was tough to photograph the entire burial mound. Tougher still to do it when there wern't any silly women wearing ponchos standing in the shot.

Knowth is about 5000 years old, and those boulders around the site are called kerbstones. Each kerbstone is decorated with ancient drawings and carvings. It was incredible to think that these rocks were carved so long ago, and that they’ve survived in such good condition.

You can see here the 5000 year old artwork carved into a kerbstone around the edge of Knowth tomb.

Later, we went inside the passage of the tomb itself. Unfortunately, we could only go a disappointingly short length down passage of the tomb itself, where we were taken to a modern room cut into mound. It seemed silly to go inside at all, really. But overall, Knowth was a great experience.

After Knowth we went back to Dublin. I got some more Burdocks Fish and Chips, and it was still delicious. Then a group of us decided we should go see another play. We figured that Jungle Book in Belfast had been something of a disappointment, and Happy Days had been a little odd, so we were hoping that the third time would be the charm.

It wasn’t to be, though. I’m not sure what got mixed up, but somehow we ended up at the ticket counter of an indie rock concert in a graffiti-filled back alley of Dublin, surrounded by piercing-riddled kids wearing all black. We got out of there, and went back to the city center.

We had time and money to kill now, so of course we went to the pub. I found my favorite pub I’ve been to in Ireland thus far: the Brazen Head. Terrible name, I know, but it’s actually the oldest pub in Ireland, established 1198. It has great music (though the music area is of course, very crowded) and a very relaxed atmosphere. It felt more like an old Irish pub than a lot of the more modern places we’d been to.

This is the oldest bar in Ireland, and the best one I've visited so far.

On Saturday morning we were scheduled for a tour of Dublin. The first stop on the tour was St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral sounds like it should be a Catholic church, and it looks like a catholic church, but it’s actually Protestant. Seems the Church of Ireland took over both of the large Catholic cathedrals during the reformation, and never quite got around to giving them back. The Cathedral itself was impressively done, with beautiful architecture. It had real flying buttresses, which was something I’d never seen before.

Flying Butresses are just cool.

And the interior was just as impressive: it even held the grave of the famous satirist, Jonathan Swift. Swift is my favorite Irish author that I’ve read thus far, so it was cool to see his grave. (Burying famous people within the walls or floor of a church was a pretty common practice, back in the day.)

There was one very, very strange thing about St. Patrick’s. The Protestants had put a gift shop in the back of the nave! There was a cash register right in front of the door; it was the first thing you saw when you walked in. It wasn’t even religious; they were selling the same sort of touristy crap we’d seen in a dozen gift shops already. I bet the priest has to look at that gift shop during every mass.

Those crazy protestants. You can see the stained glass window that shines over the altar in the background of this photo.

Next we went to Trinity College. Trinity College was founded by Elizabeth I in 1592, and it now houses the famous Book of Kells.

The Book of Kells is a book, the four Gospels, written by monks in circa 800 AD. Though ‘written’ isn’t quite accurate. ‘Painted’ would be better, because the entire thing is painted with Celtic designs of incredible intricacy. When I reached the book, I couldn’t stop staring at the pages of the thing; it was simply unbelievable. It’s the kind of thing you have to see; I can’t describe it. And pictures don’t do it justice; the photos on the internet are no substitution for the real thing. If you ever find yourself in Dublin, just go see the Book of Kells.

After the Book of Kells, we were led into the old library of Trinity College. The library housed important manuscripts and documents that Trinity owned, all on display in the center of the hall. The coolest thing there was one of Charles Darwin’s samples, a little blue flower on a bit of cardboard signed by Darwin himself. It was cool to see something signed by Darwin, who had such a huge effect on history. For our program director, a biology professor who specializes in evolution, I’m pretty sure seeing that little signature was the high point of the entire trip.

I’d seen a lot at this point, but there was another sight to be seen in Trinity Library, every bit as important as an ancient Bible or a world-changing scientist. And that was the Jedi library from the film Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. That’s right folks; I was there. In fact, it turns out ol’ George Lucas took some pictures of Trinity library, made them look all futuristic, then put them in his film without permission. Trinity’s lawyers had something to say about that, and a short while later, Mr. Lucas made a very substantial donation to Trinity College.

On the left is the Jedi Library. On the right is Trinity Library, where I was.

We ate lunch on Grafton Street (a wide, popular shopping street) then got back on the bus and drove to Dublin Castle.

We’ve seen far too many ‘manor house’ style castles on this trip (It was popular, in the Victorian era, to convert your castle to an opulent manor house. These were the best preserved, because they were in constant use until modern times, but they don’t even really look like castles.) This would be our fourth manor house we’d visited, though it was a little different from the other three we’d seen. This one was famous because it is used for state functions, more specifically, the inauguration of each new president.

This is where the new presidents of Ireland are inaugurated.

Anyway, we got through the tour, and then we were free. About four of us booked it over to the National Museum, the most famous museum in Ireland. I was really glad I did. Our tour that day was supposed to have come to the museum, but a schedule mix up sent us to Dublin Castle instead (bad trade!). So the four of us only had about an hour to tour the museum on our own, after the tour was done.

All the museums in Ireland are free of charge, which was a plus, but I still would have paid a lot to see the things I did. There were tons of artifacts from Ireland’s past; I didn’t have nearly enough time to see it all. The coolest thing from the Ireland section were the bog bodies. Bog bodies are the remains of stone aged people who died in Ireland’s bogs in ancient times. Deprived of oxygen in the wet, solid bog, the bodies are remarkably preserved, with skin and hair still attached. Their skin is brown and leathery, but you could clearly see the color of the hair, even the expression on their faces. It was eerie to look at them, knowing they’d been alive thousands of years ago.

Next I went to the Ancient Egypt section of the museum. I’d never been to a proper Egypt exhibit, and I was excited to see one. They had sarcophaguses there, and mummies, but what interested me most were the small stone slabs carved with hieroglyphics. One, in particular, showed a man holding out a bowl of incense over another man who was sitting down. The hieroglyphs revealed that the man who was sitting down was a singer who had recently died, and the man with the incense was his brother who was conducting the funeral ritual. The hieroglyphs also named both brothers, and the man who officiated and wrote the tablet. It was a huge history shock to believe that such a simple, human act of mourning a dead brother was recorded and found its way to me, thousands of miles and thousands of years away.

All too soon, the museum closed. It was almost time for mass, anyway. After the Protestants stole both cathedrals, nowadays the only Catholic mass in the city center is in a small but beautiful church a few blocks away from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. This was the most extreme example of a dying parish that I’d seen yet: Dublin is a city of a half a million people (just within city limits, over a million within the urban area) and yet there were less than 120 people there. They were almost all old; I could count on my fingers the number of heads that didn’t have white hair. The small congregations are simply universal.

On Sunday morning, it was time to leave Dublin. We only had one stop between Dublin and The Park Lodge. This was the ancient religious site of Clonmacnoise.

Clonmacnoise is smack dab in the middle of Ireland, at the intersection of the River Shannon and the ancient road between Galway and Dublin. It used to be a monastery, but it had a hard life; it was raided repeatedly for several centuries, first by the Vikings, then the Anglo Normans, and finally by the British, who destroyed it. Still standing are the ruins of the stone churches, and a cemetery with an incredible array of Celtic high crosses.

So, my final impressions of Dublin: Wonderful city with far too much to see in the time I had. I felt like I could have spent another two or three days in Dublin before I really got the feel of it. This was by far my favorite excursion I’ve been on. (except, perhaps, the Aran Islands). So I’m rather fortunate that I’ll have a chance to go back to Dublin for another day or so at the end of next week.

We have the next week of from classes, so the majority of the students here will be touring various parts of Europe. 8 of us, including myself, will be going to Eastern Europe for the week. We will fly into Venice on Friday, then take the train between Slovenia, Croatia, and Hungary, and finally we will go to Krakow, Poland and fly to Dublin from there on the 24th. So it should be an adventure.