Thursday and Friday

Thursday, June 3, 2010 continued...

Thursday afternoon, we met Martin downtown for a trip to the National Museum.  That didn't work out so well... we were supposed to leave campus at 2, which I and 3 others did, but the other 18 didn't get there till around 2:45.  Anyway, the National Museum was nifty.  I, unfortunately, wasn't in a museum mood (and you couldn't take pictures!) but I do remember a lot of what we saw.  We saw artifacts that had been preserved almost perfectly in the peat bogs of Ireland; things like fur capes, wood designs, and even PEOPLE from long ago.  I'm not joking: there were 3 people, at least partially.  It was gross.  They had skin, and hair if they had a head (one was decapitated).  Eeewww.  I didn't look at the whole body that had been found preserved...  Moving on!  They had a large exhibit of Viking artifacts: swords and other weapons, jewelry, buttons, coins, games, shoes and other leather objects, etc.  There was also a lot of gold jewelry from later than the Vikings and carved rocks from the Celts. 

Sara, Steve, and I tried to get into the National Library (right across from the National Museum, in the same complex as Parliament), but it was confusing so we just left.  We went shopping instead!  We didn't actually buy anything, but we were looking for wool shops for sweaters and scarves and such.  We found a few, committed the prices to memory, and decided to wait until after this weekend's trip to some villages to buy anything.  After that, I split off from them, grabbed a smoothie for dinner (NO potatoes!), and did a little more window shopping of my own.  I grabbed a watch for 5 euros, because otherwise I had no way of telling the time.  Then I headed back to campus. 

At 9, I wandered with Cayla and Ariel over to the Hub to hang out for a bit.  Jake and Andrew walked in and invited us out for the night, so we decided to go.  Weeellllllllllllllll... 2 hours later (don't ask), we headed to McGowan's.  I had a good time.  We sat for awhile and just hung out, then got up on the dance floor more to have something to do and to watch the Irish than anything else.  It's a funny thing: they play American music, so we know it all, and the Irish girls dance together in the middle of the floor while the guys just hang around them. 


Friday, June 4, 2010

We didn't have class on Friday, so everyone made plans for our 4-day weekend.  A lot of people went out of town on Friday, many to Galway and a few to other places.  I stayed in and was a tourist in Dublin for the day.  I was on the bus at campus around 9:30 and my first stop of the day was Trinity College.  It was founded right before the 1600s on an old monastery site (when the monks were forced off the land, they supposedly cursed the spot of the altar, located under the Bell Tower).  Anyway, it's beautiful:

That's a picture with the bell tower in the front and looking through it to see the oldest three buildings on campus.  Now it has a lot more buildings and at least two more squares.  Trinity College also has one of the oldest and most beautiful library rooms in the country - they built it to look like Trinity Cambridge's library, but it has a whopping 6 more feet of space, making it larger!  They're very proud.  It is also the largest single room library in the world.  However, I couldn't take pictures of that room.  It's not really functional as a library: apparently, as my guide said, the students are allowed to check out the books, but 80 percent of the books housed there are out-of-date and the other 20 percent are too hard to find because the books aren't shelved by author or Dewey decimal - they're shelved by length, width, and height.  It's true.  The biggest books are on the bottom shelves and the smallest are on the top shelves!

Trinity College houses the Book of Kells, a collection of the four Gospels from 800 AD.  I couldn't get pictures of it, either, but it's beautiful.  The illumination work was incredible, and to think that they did that all by candlelight! 

After Trinity, I met with Sara and Steve for lunch at Lemon, a crepe restaurant - YUM.  From there, I tried to see Dublin's city hall, but it was closed for a wedding.  So, I went back to Dublin Castle to see more of the grounds and to check out the Chester Beatty library.  The library was pretty awesome, because it housed the oldest known manuscript of the Bible found to date, a small scrap of Greek text on papyrus with words from the book of John from 150 AD.  There were many other small pages of text of the Gospels and of Paul's letters from 200-300 AD.  I just couldn't wrap my mind around the idea that these texts were copied as close as 120 years from Jesus' death and resurrection, and the original text had not long been passed around before it got where the author copied it onto the papyrus I saw.  Breathtaking.  (of course, no pictures allowed there either, but I got a postcard!)

After Dublin Castle, I went back to Christ Church and took pictures this time.  It's just so beautiful.  I tried to see the artwork in the National Gallery, but I had done a lot of walking in the hot (75 degree) weather and was too tired to see much of it before I headed back to the bus and campus.