Dublin

Hello,

Sorry about not updating :(

I was going to do a post combining weekend trips to Loch Ness and Loch Lamode, but the second got cancelled. Last weekend I went to Dublin, so I thought I’d skip to that and do Loch Ness After.

We flew directly out of Aberdeen to Dublin on a budget airline called Ryanair. The plane was actually pretty big and comfortable, but they try to sell you really random stuff. Anyone want some smokeless cigarettes? We didn’t get there until the early evening, so we didn’t go into city proper (about 10miles away) until Saturday. Instead we wandered around Swords. We never figured out quite what it was. It was like a small town (or village as they say here), but it was so close to Dublin it might have been a suburb.

There is a “no runners” rule in some of the pubs. I asked what runners got up to when drunk that banned them from pubs, but sadly they were only forbade because it could upset people who scheduled fancy parties. Apparently, runners mean tennis shoes. I was hoping runners had a tendency to strip and run around like they do at GAC :)

On Saturday the first thing we saw was Trinity College. It’s a pretty famous college (which I had forgotten about) that boasts Oscar Wilde, Bram Stocker, and several other famous alums. It’s also pretty gorgeous.

Student’s memorial building

Entrance

The tour guide seemed particularly fond of the story of the college’s only murder. Some students a few hundred years ago started throwing stones at a strict lecturer’s rooms. The lecturer got a gun and started shooting at them. Then (this is where is gets really bizarre) the students ran back to their room, got their guns, and started a shootout. The lecturer was killed, and oddly the students got out of charges and went on to become successful lawyers. This was all in a main square of the college. I wonder what the neighbors thought.

Also, the college had one of my favorite things- heaps of books and libraries. The college hosts the Book of Kells a ca. 800 book of the gospels that took 30 years for monks to (almost)complete. The blue of the book was created from lapis in Afghanistan. Ridiculous when you consider it was during the Middle Ages, and they were in an isolated monastery in the middle of nowhere. The book was stolen at one point in the medieval period, but found a few months later “under a sod”. It’s been rebound in four volumes, two of which were on display. It was fun to try and piece out random bits of Latin, but I am defiantly not a translator.

There was also a library on exhibit that was awesome. It’s the longest open library in the UK. What is insane is all the books were organized by size when it was in use. No idea how they found things. I bet they were happy for matching volumes. They wouldn’t let us take pictures of anything, so I’m cheating and using google images.

PS-Something I’ve been meaning to mention. The entire library here is all in Dewey. Dewey! Plus the periodicals are blended into the books. I’m sure some of you can feel my pain at that (Hi, Sonja and Jay!).

This is getting pretty big and bulky, so I think I’ll split Dublin into two groups. Wait until you see the prison :)