Dublin Theme Days

Dead Body Day

I made it to Dublin!  Before I left home I watched Once in preparation (twice, ironically...)  My travels went relatively uneventfully, which is good.  On both legs of my flight I had a three-seat row to myself.  The most memorable part of my airport experience was probably when the passport checkpoint mad in Dublin called me "sir" three times before he realized his mistake.  Caitlin knows that I am 100% not bitter about this fact, and have not been talking about it since I arrived.

Yesterday was my first full day in Dublin.  After a breakfast of muesli and tea, we bundled up in our coats and walking shoes and headed toward central Dublin.  Caitlin's apartment is on an outlet of the river Liffey, and at night the dark water reflects a row of trees that are strung up with blue and white lights.  She lives about a ten minute walk from the city center.  I could tell we were getting close when the sidewalks became packed with pedestrians, who darted at every angle across the many-branched intersections and power walked down the unmarked streets.  As we approached the city I also noticed that there were statues everywhere, on pedestals, guarding buildings, chilling on sidewalk corners, like the lovely (and busty) Molly Malone, wheeling her wheelbarrow, or, famously, lounging on a rock like Mr. Wilde.

Caitlin and I decided the theme for the day was definitely dead bodies.  Dublin is currently hosting the Bodies Exhibit, which I never saw during its stints in Seattle or San Francisco.  I finally went yesterday, and I was completely blown away.  The exhibit presents real specimens of virtually every part of the body, preserved, labeled, and explained.  It also shows some full bodies, each one demonstrating a particular bodily function, such as the intricate network of our circulatory system or the layout of the digestive track.  The exhibit was at once fascinating and disturbing, as is to be expected.  I have always found it amazing that most people, including myself, know so much more about the world around them than what is going on inside their own bodies.  Things that shocked me about what I saw: the liver is HUGE, there are so many veins in our fingertips, stomachs are small compared with how much food we sometimes stuff into them, and how a diseased organ looks compared with a healthy organ.  There are probably another twenty pages I could write about my reactions to the exhibit, but I'll move on.

We had lunch and a stroll in the park and then proceeded to... see more dead bodies!  Caitlin took me to the history museum to see their exhibit on Stone Age people whose bodies have been preserved in bogs.  There were four bog bodies there, I think, some with curly hair intact, others with a face or a hand particularly well preserved.  All the conclusions they were able to make based on studies of the bog bodies are really interesting, but I'm a little tired of writing about carcasses for now.  Sorry.

Later in the evening I went with Caitlin and some of her friends to an "old man pub," as they call it, for a jam session of traditional Irish music.  I had some cider (too delicious for its own good) and good conversation in the cozy booths clustered throughout the pub.  Caitlin knew one of the Irish girls playing the fiddle, and she came and chatted with us about dead bodies, thus bringing our first theme day full circle.  

India Day

Day two has been declared India Day because we had Indian food for dinner and then went to see Slumdog Millionaire.  Other than that, it has actually been another Ireland Day, surprisingly enough.  Caitlin had class, and I planned to spend that time going to a particular museum that caught my eye and reading/writing in St. Stephen's Green Park, but instead I ended up walking around the city for about four hours by myself.  If you could plot my path on a map, it would probably look really zig-zaggy and ridiculous, but I just kept getting lost, regaining my bearings, and getting lost again.  It was nice.  I loved getting a feel for the different streets - the swanky pedestrian malls, the streets frantic with traffic in the shadow of centuries-old architecture, and the districts of cafés geared toward the college crowd all had very distinct energies.  I think I used those energies to orient myself more than anything else, as the streets are unlabeled and hard to navigate.  I got a delicious slice of veggie pizza in a covered market area that I think I recognized from Once, and ate it in the park.

I met up with Caitlin at Trinity (the college she attends this year, founded in 1592) and she took me to see the Book of Kells, a bible from the 9th century, as well as the fabulously musty old library, with all its ladders, spiral staircases, and intimidating marble busts.  The Book of Kells actually wasn't there, but seeing that library made up for it.  It's humbling to think of the kind of studying that must have gone on in that space when it was still used regularly by students.  Research must have been so laborious - I'm not sure how many of us today would be able to handle it.  Then again, maybe students in the 17th and 18th centuries were slackers, too, just in much cooler facilities.