Dublin with a sniffle

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We slept well last night. I think we were both out by 9:30. I woke up this morning feeling miserable. While Mark was in the shower, I called the front desk and said I needed to see a doctor. Note to self: when calling the front desk of a hotel telling them you need to see a doctor, say, “It’s NOT an emergency but I need to see a doctor.” They called back in a few minutes and said the doctor couldn’t be here for about a half an hour. At that point I said it wasn’t an emergency and there was a disappointed pause. (Guess I ruined the good story for the pub that night!) He said, “I will ring you back,” which he did in short order. He said he was really sorry but because it wasn’t an emergency, I would have to go to the doctor’s office which, of course, is what I had expected. He had made an appointment for me at 11:00 and the office was a 1 minute walk from the hotel. We went to breakfast (Irish tea will cure many ills, let me tell you!) and at about 10:30 got directions and set out for Dr. Brady’s surgery. We were told it was on the corner with a pharmacy down below and the surgery on the second floor. Sure enough, about two minutes from the hotel we found Brady’s Pharmacy and a little door on the side that said Surgery. We went in and checked in, were directed to the waiting room. Mark brought his book but I had nothing worthwhile to read so was forced to partake of British gossip magazines. I read all about Prince William doing a 2 month stint in the Navy in preparation for his being the commander in chief of the British Forces one day. His rank was junior lieutenant (equivalent to ensign, I would think) and his mission was to sail on drug trade patrol in the Caribbean. Anyway, in very little time, I got called up to see the doctor, Dr. Fergus Brady, about 5’ 6” tall, one gray bushy eyebrow, thick salt and pepper hair and a smile that never cooled. “Ah, Elizabet,” he said, “so sorry to keep you waiting. What’s the problem today, dear?” I told him I had a sinus infection and he said, “I could tell by the look of you coming in. You can tell by the look, ya know.” He was absolutely the cutest thing. He did a pretty thorough exam, and then gave me a shot, a prescription and my marching orders. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, Elizabet, drink plenty of fluids for the next few days. And Elizabet, if you wouldn’t mind, go back to the hotel now and get some rest and try and take it easy for the next few days.” To me it sounded like these things were optional but I knew Mark would have other ideas. Truthfully, I didn’t feel so hot so going back to the hotel and resting for a bit wasn’t really a problem and that’s what we did. And all of this friendliness and good advice was only 150 Euros. And all of the prescriptions could be filled right down stairs at Brady’s Pharmacy. Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Oh well, the way I was feeling, I didn’t much care.
Got the drugs and headed back to the hotel, because I didn’t mind and it wasn’t too much trouble. In my resting time, I had read something that I had seen earlier but forgotten about: the Irish Heritage Card. It’s a card that costs 21 Euros and gets the bearer into probably a hundred sites owned and operated by the Office of Public Works (OPW) which, of course, in the United States would mean the sewage system but in Ireland means buildings and sites of heritage. So once we headed out, our first stop was the tourist information office where we procured those passes. It turns out the Kilmainham Gaol was part of that too but we were too late for that. We mentioned that we were going to see the Book of Kells next and the girl at tourist information told us about a book that would get us half price admission to many sites outside of the OPW sites, including the Book of Kells so we got that too. We headed over to Trinity College, bought tickets for the campus tour (“It’s just started right up ahead, you haven’t missed anything,” the young ticket seller said) and took a look around the campus. The tour guide was a young man who was a student at Trinity and told funny stories about the old institution with a great deal of affection. He said that his sister had graduated from Trinity so he knew what to expect when he graduated next year: two hours of boredom, all in Latin. He said the most terrifying part was that they seated you at graduation by your class rank so the first to graduate was the number one in the class and the last was the bottom of the heap. He said he was working hard to not be in the last seat. Later on when we were recalling that story, Mark said, “You know what they call the person who graduates last in the class at medical school? Doctor.” True. Hopefully the diploma of that poor sod doesn’t say, “Dead Last.” Of course it would probably be in Latin, so who would know?
The Trinity library was an impressive old building and we went in to see the Book of Kells. They have quite a nice little exhibit about illuminated manuscripts. There are three books on display in the inner room besides the Book of Kells, though the Book of Kells is the most spectacular. There are two volumes to the Book of Kells and they have each opened to a page, one that showed the script and the illumination of letters and one that showed illustrations of a gospel. The illustration page they had displayed was the symbols of the four gospel writers. The book is written in Latin so I am not sure which gospel page was shown. The book is quite large (each side about 12 x 18 I would guess, so 24 x 18 opened up) and is under glass with many people hovered around it. We waited our turn and did our gawking. It truly is amazing, and to think the amount of time that the monk/s took to complete this is truly mind shattering. The level of detail is indescribable. I know because I just tried to think of a word to describe it and could come up with none.
After the Book of Kells, we walked over to Christ Church Cathedral, the Dublin cathedral of the Church of Ireland and took a look around there. I think we got a discount on our admission for that. It is a lovely old church with lots of Anglo named people buried about. We didn’t have time to see St. Patrick’s Cathedral (doctors suggestions and all) but did walk by the outside of it. The flying buttresses and stained glass (external, of course) were impressive.
We had dinner in a little Italian place off of Grafton street and then went and joined the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl which began at The Duke Pub on Duke Street. We had booked this ahead of time (Google it—you can’t miss) and it was really a blast. There were two actors who led the pub crawl and they acted out various scenes from great Irish literature as the evening went on and took us to pubs haunted by writers. They started out in the Duke Pub with a scene from Waiting for Godot. Samuel Beckett was a graduate of Trinity and came back and taught there for two years. (Hated teaching there, according to the Trinity tour guide from earlier, left, went to Paris and spent the rest of his life happily miserable in France. Sounds about right.) They also did selections from Oscar Wilde and Thomas Can’t Remember—sorry, too many meds. Along the way, they filled in a bit of Irish literary history. My guess is you could do this crawl on several nights and get a different show every night. In one of the pubs, we talked to a man who was from San Diego. He and his wife and daughter had been over here for about ten days so far and were leaving in about four more. We asked what he had thoroughly enjoyed so far and he thought a moment before he said the Killarney National Park and the Cliffs of Mohr but really, it had all been wonderful.
The weather was on and off showery but we had our rain gear so it didn’t slow us down. As we finished the pub crawl and headed back to the hotel, we noted that we could see blue sky and the temperatures were quite mild. It seemed that both evenings we have been in Ireland we had had showery and cool days and at about 8:00 at night the rain finally cleared and there was some blue sky. The sun doesn’t go down until about 10:45 so the days are quite long. We took the tram back to the hotel (1.50 Euro—a deal!) and now we’re going off to sleep.

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