Day 1 & 2, Dublin Ireland. August 4-6. 2009

I finally made it to Ireland!

Dublin is a really cool town, with narrow streets and a river running through the middle and lots of quaint pubs where people sing in the evenings.

My hotel looks like it was decorated by Alice in Wonderland!

The walls are painted dark green, there's a lot of old woodwork, the doors have many coats of black paint. The best part is the 2 funny red leather chairs in the lobby and the huge red roses in the dark carpet! The people are friendly, and a tiny little old guy helped me. He was probably a leprechaun in his former life.

I paid a college student for a tour of Trinity College (like their Harvard, except founded by Elizabeth I in the 1500's), which was very interesting, with lots of inside looks at student life. The tour also included admission to the "Book of Kells," which claims to be the world's greatest art from the early medieval period. It's what they call an illuminated manuscript. It's a hand copied version of the four gospels; just the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, written in Latin, of course. It was copied by monks in the 8th century on pages made of vellum (very thin stretched calfskin.) The best part is they decorated each page with fancy lettering and sometimes whole pages of illustrations.

Afterwards we went upstairs to their "great hall library." It's 2 tall stories high and 200 feet long, with old brown books on shelves clear to the ceiling. Guess what, they are not arranged in the Dewey Decimal System, but arranged by size! Who would file library books by size?

I thought it looked like something straight out of Harry Potter. Later I found out they really did film the Harry Potter library there, so that's why it looked so much like it!

The picture above is the dining room of my Dublin hotel.

I also saw the original wooden Irish harp. Hundreds of years ago it became a symbol of Irish nationalism, especially after the English outlawed it. Now you see it on flags everywhere.