Seeing Old Stuff

Last night we settled in at around 11pm, forcing ourselves to play by the local time zone.  After 30 hours of no sleep at all, we were looking forward to some blissful unconsciousness in a horizontal position.  Sleep came immediately.

Sometime during the night, my dreaming was interrupted by Bugs Bunny and Wile E Coyote, who charged onto the scene and obliterated any prior dreams.

Where did they come from?

My subconscious was struggling to process these impostors when enough synapses began firing to start making some connections.

Looney Tunes.

My ringtone.

My phone!

In my sleepy stupor, I managed to heave one eye open and could see the display on my phone glowing with a blurry name.  A name and not a number meant that this person was in my contact list. Donning my glasses cleared that up and also revealed the time.  It was 1:50am.

The caller shall remain nameless but my answering the phone reveals my love for this person.  Most other callers would be silenced and ignored.

“Hello”, I croaked.

“Were you asleep?” the caller asked.

Excellent deduction!

The caller quickly grasped the time difference and apologized for the interruption.  After a short conversation, the call was ended.

Thankfully, I was able to return to sleep and finally woke to a room flooded with light, at 6:30am.  

As we were having breakfast, Terry and Jill texted us that they had just touched down in Dublin.  So they will probably make today’s planned outing, at 10am.  They showed up not too long after that, happy to be here after a day’s delay.

We walked to Trinity College, which has an entire building dedicated to the Book of Kells.  This book contains the four Gospels of the New Testament, written in Latin, and is famous for its intricate and vibrant illustrations.  It is believed to have been created around 800 AD.  This is a very popular tourist attraction and today was no exception.  The place was packed.  Photographs of the book itself are not allowed, so the photo below was lifted from the Book of Kells web site.  The actual scene today was of a crowded room, each person trying to get their glimpse of the book, which was open to a passage in Matthew.

In an adjoining room which had lots of displays about the book and its creation, it was a little hard to read some of the text because of the number of people.

The tour continued into the Long Room, a vast and ornate library that is the largest library in Ireland.  One notable thing about this library is that it contains very few books.  About 200,000 books were removed from the shelves as part of a restoration project, so nearly all the shelves in this cavernous space are empty.  They will eventually be returned however.

A prominent feature of this room is the large globe suspended from the ceiling.  Nearly touching the walls on both sides of the room, the globe was created using NASA imaging of the earth’s surface, showing how it would look from space.

Kind of an exercise in contrasts: an old library with old books that are no longer there, composed of mostly dark stained wood, and a modern digitally-composed image of the earth, glowing brightly in the middle of it.

Our next destination contained stuff that was even older.  The National Museum of Ireland has a building for archeology which contains relics from several archeological periods.  One such item is a dugout canoe dating from about 2000 BC.  At 50 feet long, it’s one of the longest dugout canoes in Europe.

Another relic is the Fadden More Psalter, a copy of the book of Psalms found accidentally in a peat bog in 2006.  This Psalter is dated to the late 4th century.

As we left the Museum, Terry and Jill left to go back take a nap and Deb and I hopped on the DART train toward Howth, a small town on the coast.  There is a popular cliff walk here and this was one of the places we wanted to see.

This was a beautiful walk on a trail hugging the top of the cliff and we hiked this for a while.  We turned around to allow us to make it back to downtown Dublin and because it was becoming obvious that the rain that was predicted all day was not going to hold off any longer.  It started to pour as we were returning and we donned our rain coats and rain pants.  It was here that I found out that my waterproof shoes filled with water and my raincoat was more of a windbreaker.  I was quite wet when we boarded the train for the trip back.

This doesn’t bode well for the remainder of the trip.  Rain is predicted every day.

After getting off the train, on our walk back to the Kilronan House, the rain started anew.  This time it was accompanied by pea-size hail, which made a rather loud rattling sound as it bounced off our clothing.  Didn’t expect this.  Now I was really drenched.

After a short rest and dry-off we connected with Terry and Jill again and had dinner at Zeytoon, a Persian restaurant a few blocks away.  We had Doner sandwiches several times a couple of years ago in the Netherlands, and they were great.  This place served Doner sandwiches also, and we tried them out.  They were a bit of a disappointment.

I hope my shoes dry out before I have to wear them tomorrow.  I packed light so they are the only shoes I have.