Dublin Day 3--wrapping it up

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Geo: 53.3441, -6.26749

Today is obviously Sunday. This being a part-Catholic, part-Protestant country and all, most things are closed until about noon. This made the day a little more challenging because we couldn't get an early start. Luckily, after 2 days on the ground, I have a much better idea of the layout of the city and how to use the bus system. This makes things go so much more smoothly.

We started out on O'Connell Street, near the Spike and checked out James Joyce's statue and then wound our way across the Liffey to Trinity College. It wasn't open yet, so we split a scone, had some tea and circumnavigated the university until the first tour started at 11:40. We had a very charming student guide who gave us a half-hour history of the college and some color commentary. We learned about charming historic traditions like, if you get thirsty during exams, the proctor will bring you a glass of wine. Somehow I can't imagine U of R doing that, but I wish they would. At least you could take the edge off. Also, when you graduate, they read the names in rank order, so if you are last in your class, everyone would know it; that's some serious public/peer pressure.
With our tour ticket we got admission to see the Book of Kells which is an illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels dating from about 800. It's written on vellum made from calf skin and I can't believe how well it has held up. They had an excellent exhibition before the main room so that you could get an idea about how the different pages look. For obvious reasons, you can only actually see 2 pages (an open book) at a time. They change which pages from day to day, but who goes back every day? We also enjoyed seeing how they made vellum, mixed ink and illuminated the manuscript with quill pens.
It was about 2pm by this time and I had a restaurant planned for lunch. It is called Queen of Tarts on Dame Street, across from City Hall. Using my restaurant savant trait, we had two really good meals today and this was the first. Queen of tarts has savory tarts, soups and very nice salads for lunch and sweet tarts, cupcakes, Madelines and other fresh-baked goods for dessert. Josh had a lovely chicken sandwich and carrot-fennel soup. I had the chicken-coriander tart with salad. They were both wonderful. For dessert Josh chose the rhubarb-strawberry crumble tart with the clotted cream-- soooo good!
We hopped on the bus to St. Patrick's Cathedral. Unfortunately for us, people were worshiping in there, so the gawkers couldn't get in. However, we browsed around the very nice gardens and enjoyed looking at the exterior. We tried to get someone to take a group shot of us in front of St. Patrick's for the blog, but the only person I could find was a non-English speaker who was unfamiliar with how to use a camera.
Interesting cultural notes: Today is Mother's Day in Ireland. So this year, I technically get two. Josh wasn't buying it though. We passed many street vendors selling flowers for boys who were interested in spending money appreciating their mothers. Also, the Dublin Rugby team beat Whales for a grand slam yesterday. It was the first time in something like 61 years and the town was all abuzz today. There was a big celebration downtown. We might have gone, but we still had a few sights we wanted to see so we gave it a miss. I would venture to guess, however, that there were more drunk happy people than is usual for a Sunday night walking about this evening.
After St. Patrick's we rode the bus up to the Dublin Writer's Museum where we read about and heard about the most important Irish writers in history. I want to look for something by James Stephens when I get home. He sounds interesting and I hadn't heard of him before. Could be a relative.
We were originally hoping to go on the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl this evening, but ended up deciding against it because it would keep us out pretty late. Instead we stopped in our third bookstore looking for a book for my niece, Maeve. So far, no luck. I've even been looking in tables of contents and indexes of likely books. Oh well.
Our last stop for the evening was a restaurant called Bruno's in the Temple Bar area where we had an excellent Italian/Irish meal. Josh had potato and leek soup and lasagna with Irish beef. I had borek and risotto with prawns and shrimp in a light tomato sauce. Both were really good and there was no skimping on the strips of Parmesan.
We were able to get back to the room by a little after 8, so we should be ready to head for Kilkenny bright and early. I bought tickets for the 9:30 train.

Josh says that he really liked the audio tour at the Writer's museum and the rhubarb-strawberry crumble.

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Photos

Bell tower at Trinity
The local superstition is that if you walk below the tower and the bell rings, you will fail your exams.

Handel's chair for the Messiah premier
I'm not sure why this is at the Writer's Museum, but it is.

Josh working on his movie
What is different in this picture? Yes! Josh finished his quest for a new hat! We found it in a little arcade off Grafton Street. The part that was making it so hard was that he already owned the classic Irish-style chapeau and wanted something different.

Queen of Tarts
Many tasty tarts to choose from.

River Liffey at dusk
Josh really liked this view, but was somewhat disappointed in the picture observing, "It looks much prettier in person."

St. Patrick's
This was from the park next to the Cathedral. They have a nice lawn, some trees and flowers and tribute arches to the major writers of Ireland. I'm so pleased that writers are so celebrated here. Well, writers and brewers of various alcoholic products.

Us at Trinity
We've had terrible luck trying to get someone reliable to take our picture, so we started trying to do it ourselves.