Soaking up a rather un-Irish sun on the rocks at the Forty Foot, I had completed a double pilgrimage (see, I told you!). As I mentioned in the first Dublin entry, the reason I came to Ireland in the first place was to explore the city of Joyce's imagination. His novel Ulysses maps out the city like no other work, and it starts with Stephen Dedalus at a tower in Sandycove, overlooking the famous bathing spot, the Forty Foot. So coming to these unpretentious rocks (which once were solely for "gentleman" to brave the chilly waters, usually "textile-free" as a German woman once described the, um, attire of a thermal bath in Wiesbaden), was both the end of a day exploring the literary history of Dublin (the Writer's Museum, the James Joyce Centre, etc.) and the
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