Dublin Part Two

Ok! It's only five days in, and I've already fallen behind. You'll shortly see how quickly we made our way across Europe. Thankfully, we're not doing the trip this year, or else we'd still be stuck in England!

So Dublin:
On the 18th, we went to a park and enjoyed the sunshine. There were some amazing tulips, and at one point I was caught in a rather...compromising position with a statue of Oscar Wilde that happened to be on top of a large boulder.

Then we went to Saint Patrick's Cathedral. St. Patrick (who drove the snakes out of Ireland, though wikipedia just informed me that 'post-glacial Ireland never had snakes', way to go wikipedia) was actually from Roman Britain, in a strange kind of irony. Anyway, St Partick's Cathedral was built on the spot where St.Patrick apparently baptized his followers, way back in the 4th century AD. Or CE. Which ever you want. It's a really interesting building, because it looks like it was built in about 1900. The rock is really smooth and uniform gray. Cathedrals like St. Patrick's, that obviously get a lot of tourism are some times hard to deal with because a lot of the literature talks about how the Catholic church came to 'save' the heathens and drive out their wicked ways.
Whatever man, I'm just here for the architecture. (And now after a seminar on popular religion before the Reformation, I would be even more combative about it.)

Next, we went to the National Museum of Ireland, Art+Design, and History. This was one of the best museums of the whole trip. I think that Molly actually went to the Guinness factory, the other two went off...somewhere, and I just stayed in one room, reading every scrap of paper. There was an exhibit on the 1916 Easter Rising, and though it was tiny, I spent a lot of time in there. There were hand written letters from all the major players--Thomas Clarke, Eamon DeValera, Micheal Collins,etc. They even had DeValera's original, handwritten Declaration of Irish Independence.
And in the aftermath of the rebellion, they even had a "wee little note of good bye" to John Daly by one of the conspirators. It gave me chills to read a letter asking Daly to tell his wife good bye from a man who wanted freedom so badly that he was willing to risk his life.

The thing that made this exhibit so amazing was that Easter Rebellion was less than 100 years ago. I feel like who ever was in charge at the time was actually self-conscious--perhaps aware is a better word-- of what they saved and preserved in terms of documents. Maybe it's just the nature of bureaucracy, but *everything* was preserved, which really lets future generations construct a better picture of what exactly was going on. That's why this gave be chills, because you could almost feel the desperation weighing down the room as these people fought and died and argued right in front of you in a flurry of correspondence.

And then I went outside to collect myself and gather my thoughts, and got hit on by two museum guards. Go figure.

We left Dublin the 19th, with a brief stop in the morning to the General Post Office, one of the headquarters of Easter Rising. There are still bullet holes in the columns that you can stick your fingers in. It gave me chills. I remember that it had rained early in the morning, but that the sun was out, and shining across the pavement in front of the Post Office. We were the only ones around because it was about 7 in the morning, and the silence just pressed on you and the glare made it hard to see, until you were right in front of the Post Office. They still have a memorial there, and there were fresh flowers. It's startling to think that all this violence happened with in a generation and it still affects so much today.

On To Belfast. In another post.