But we had to leave almost immediately to catch the 10:28 train to Geneva Airport. There, after about a 2½ ride, we had no problem taking the 3:45 Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, where we again took the Airlink 747 bus into town and got off at O'Connell Street, a couple of blocks from our hotel, the Best Western Premier Academy Plaza, the same that we had had at the beginning of the trip.
Ireland, of course, is substantially different from Switzerland. The cuisine is much better, as we proved by following a Rough Guide (online) recommendation and going to a restaurant called Eden, on Meetinghouse Square, near Temple Bar. It has a kind of artsy, bohemian feel, with modern décor. Our table was right next to the open kitchen, so my back was warmed and Mary Joy had a front-row seat to watch meals being prepared. Our food was very good.
We wandered around a little, up the pedestrianized shopping of Grafton Street, to St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin’s central park (though not anywhere as big as New York’s Central Park). They were closing the gates as we arrived (9 p.m.), and all the shops were closed, since it was Sunday evening, so we walked back down Grafton Street, past Trinity College and the Old Parliament, across the Liffey and up O’Connell Street, back to our hotel.
There is an Ireland-related story that I forgot to tell earlier. On the night in Interlaken that we were unsuccessfully looking for wi-fi, as we left McDonald’s, Mary Joy saw a group of five or six young (12- or 13-year-old) girls. She approached them and asked them in German if they knew where we could find internet access. They were clearly having trouble understanding what she meant because, as it turned out, they weren’t Swiss but Irish. Assuming that someone walking on the Hoheweg in Interlaken lives in Interlaken and is not a tourist is like assuming that someone walking in Times Square in New York is a New Yorker and not a tourist. When the Irish girls learned that we were from the U.S., they asked if we’d been to Canada. Yes. Had we been to Toronto? Yes, Mary Joy had. Had we met Justin Bieber? Mary Joy had no idea who they were talking about. Of course, they didn’t really expect that just because we were from the same continent as the latest boy singer teen heartthrob, we would actually know him. I think that American girls of that age might have asked a Canadian the same thing, but they would have been louder and more obvious about it. Irish humor is deadpan, low-key, subtle, full of whimsy.
On Monday morning (July 5th), we got on a big bus on O’Connell Street for the Mary Gibbons tour to the Hill of Tara and Newgrange. Most of the other people on board, it turned out, were students from Loyola University in New Orleans, in Dublin for a summer program at Trinity College.
Mary Gibbons Tours, though very well reviewed in the guidebooks, appears to be basically a one-woman operation, with Mary herself guiding the tours. On the way to Tara, she was very informative about Irish history and prehistory, especially as it related to the valley of the River Boyne.
First stop was the Hill of Tara, where we were let out to look around for half an hour. Though nothing was left of its ancient glory as the seat of Irish High Kings except various earthworks, the site itself, with its views over long distances, was what must have impressed people back then. We had someone take our picture by the rock where the High Kings were crowned.
We got back on the bus, and on the way to the interpretive center for the great passage tombs of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, we passed Slane Castle, home to rock concerts and the first “Celtic Woman” TV special. Then Mary told us about the Battle of the Boyne, which, in 1690, confirmed Protestant rule in England and Ireland.
At the interpretive center, we went through the exhibition area, then saw a seven-minute film and, eventually, walked out across a bridge to a pickup area, where we and the other members of the Mary Gibbons group had a 1:45 pickup time. The Newgrange passage tomb had had some sort of fungal invasion, so now the number of visitors was strictly limited. Each group had to be taken by bus to the tomb at a particular time, and was given one hour there. Our buses picked us up, went the 3 kilometers (about two miles) to Newgrange and deposited us at the gate,
where we were met by an Office of Public Works (equivalent to the Park Service) guide, also named Mary. She led us up the hill at a brisk walk, leading us to think of hiking in Switzerland. There, while she was speaking, it suddenly started raining, heavily, and just as suddenly stopped. She put on a windbreaker without dropping a word and just as expertly (the Irish are experts in rain showers) took it off again. I got wet, but quickly dried off. Mary Joy had gotten her windbreaker on almost as quickly as Mary.We learned about how the tomb had been built, around 5200 years ago—before the pyramids, a thousand years before Stonehenge, how the entrance had been discovered in the late 1600s, how it had been excavated and restored (controversially) in the 1960s to 80s. Mary told us the various theories as to what the geometric art incised in its huge stones meant and how the tomb might (or might not) have been used. She then took us inside, through a long, narrow, uphill passage and told us about how at dawn (8:58 a.m.) on the winter solstice and four surrounding days, light from the rising sun would penetrate to the center of the giant mound.
Then we got a chance to look around and take pictures before going back to the interpretive center, then back to Dublin.
For dinner, we went to Fallon & Byrne, a big food hall, plus wine bar, plus restaurant. Mary Joy thought it was pretentious and the meal she had didn’t work either conceptually or in execution. I didn’t like it as much as Eden, but I thought it was okay and didn’t get angry about it.
Then, we went to Stephen’s Green. Mary Joy found the number of drunks around in Dublin (begging, weaving around, talking to themselves, sleeping on benches) disturbing. Unlike in the United States, where most drunks and panhandlers look to be middle-aged (maybe prematurely), a large proportion of those in Dublin appeared to be in their twenties.
We went looking for Irish traditional music, but figured that the best we could do under the circumstances would be something heavily touristy. We were right. We ended up at Oliver St. John Gogarty’s Pub, which has “trad” music seven nights a week, and since that music is loudly amplified, it can be heard out on the street, to draw people in. We were drawn in, and ended up enjoying ourselves. There was a three-piece band—singer and M.C. on guitar (didn’t get his name), elderly accordionist Des Leach and Leach’s daughter Norie (?) on fiddle. They were very good (though it would have been better without the amplifiers), and the guitarist kept up a funny patter and interaction with the (overwhelmingly American) audience. The whole place was still decorated with American flags and the waitstaff wore black cowboy hats, in honor of the Fourth of July. We went to the bar, and I ordered a Guiness, while Mary Joy apologized to the bartender for not being able to have a beer and asked if a mineral water would be okay. The bartender, with typical Irish tongue-in-cheek, replied that he, too, was sorry that she couldn’t have a beer, but that a mineral water would be fine. We stayed for quite a while, and bought one of their CDs, before heading back to the hotel.
This morning (Tuesday, July 6th), we caught the Airlink bus to the airport. Dublin is one of the few places where you go through U.S. immigration before you arrive in the United States. The only problem with that was that the waiting area for the flight, after passing through Immigration, is too small. Otherwise everything has gone uneventfully. I have spent most of the flight catching up with this blog, to post when we get to Chicago.
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