June 27 - Dublin

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Most of Monday was spent trying to stay awake fighting every hour against jet lag. Tuesday, we had sufficient sleep and were ready to explore Dublin. We had figured out the city buses and were able to make our way to the Guinness brewery.

I was disappointed to find that the tour did not take place in the actual brewery but was a staged museum multimedia experience. However, the Guinness Brewhouse made up for it by providing a good total experience. There was a good café and, at the top, there was a bar high above the city with floor to ceiling glass all around offering an excellent view of the city, such as it was. Dublin is a squat, gray industrial town of low buildings and row houses. The tallest building we saw was the Heineken building along the Liffey river only a dozen stories high. Not that height makes beauty. Our own Washington is a city with nothing above a dozen stories, but it has architecture of style and variety. Dublin is drab. Its smaller row houses and shops add color to the streets. But Dublin is not economically depressed. On the contrary, Dublin and all of Ireland showed signs of prosperity, and we drove a thousand-plus kilometers throughout southern and western Ireland. So, we can report the Celtic Tiger roars.

New homes are being built everywhere and the older ones are immaculately kept. I joked that I wanted to go into the house paint business in Ireland since every stucco house in Ireland bore fresh paint. Street sweepers were present in all towns and trash was not to be seen. Ireland has the image of poverty stretching back to the potato famine of 1845 and from that time forward. However, things now look bright. They even have a “Tidy Town” designation many villages proudly post at their city limits.

We found ourselves looking for distressed areas and poorly maintained property to no avail. Not to say every house is a mansion. Most were modest by American standards; however, most exceeded American standards in fresh appearance and trim gardens.

The contrast between the old and new Ireland was personified at a gas station in Blarney. Two men operated the station, perhaps father and son. The younger man, when we noted the obvious prosperity, could offer no frame of reference; but the older man, a slim man with ruddy skin and thin gray hair, focused his blue eyes in the distance as though looking into the past and said that when he was young “nobody had any money, nobody. You couldn’t get a ten-pound loan from the bank.” “Now,” he said, “it’s all on borrowed money.” I later wished I had probed further for the meaning of that remark, but I believe he meant that with prosperity comes credit. Those second homes we saw being built probably have mortgages just like in America.

After leaving Guinness, we wandered to Trinity College. One of the finer attractions there is the Chester Beatty Library where we saw an exhibit of Chinese prints. Note: Best of all, it’s free.

With a free evening in front of us, we decided to take a two-hour “Ghost Bus” tour. When we asked the bartender at our hotel about it, he said it was silly. That was enough for me. We had to do it. He recommended seeing the free Irish dancing at the Arlington Hotel. We did both.

But first, the Ghost Bus: Finding the bus office for the tour taxed our knowledge of Dublin street addresses. In the states, odd numbered street addresses appear on one side of the street and even on the other. In Dublin, the numbers on one side go one after the other in sequence and then back down on the other. It leaves you guessing about where the numbers appear. So where is 79 O’Connell? Just as the bus was ready to leave, we found it.

The tour itself was fun, enlivened by the narrator, an actor, who was the tour itself. We stopped at a graveyard for tips on bodysnatching and at an old church for a tutorial on leper colonies around Dublin in the old days. The balance of the tour education can be summarized as:

Bram Stoker wrote Dracula.
He could not pronounce his name Abraham as a child and became simply Bram.
He attended Trinity College in Dublin.
He got the Dracula fable from bedtime stories told to him by his mother.
He did not get a good night’s sleep until he was 27.

The tour narrator said the vampire story was influenced by the appearance and actions of victims of cholera. Cholera causes the skin to turn pallid and the gums to recede, exposing the canines. Worse, the gums bleed, so the canines drip blood; hence, the characteristics of a vampire.

I am not so sure about the narrator’s further claims that the cholera inflicted dressed in their best clothes and slept in their coffins. Should they die in their sleep, no one need handle them.

After the bus returned us to O’Connell Street, we walked down to the river to the Arlington Hotel to see Irish dancing. Yes folks, this is the stuff made famous in the States by Riverdance. The bar was full, but we were able to stand near the stage. There were four female dancers and one male dancer, rather than the long line in Riverdance, but it was the real thing and very fine dancing at that.

The dancers were followed by a trio playing folk music. By that time a table became available and we joined an English couple who took the same Ghost tour to finish the night. Naturally Ellen and I had to end the night with dancing. Swing that is. That Irish dancing looked to be too hard on the heels.