Four Days In Dublin

This past Tuesday through Friday I spent in Dublin. While I was there, I pretty much walked around a lot, walking into different shops and buildings and talking to different people. I even managed to get myself lost, which was an experience in and of itself.

To put things in perspective for those of you keeping tabs at home, Dublin is a little bigger than Omaha, with just over 90,000 more people in its population. While Dublin is a larger city population-wise, it is more compact than Omaha. This is partially because it is a city in Europe, but also partially because it is an island city.

I really enjoyed my time in Dublin. I liked the city and felt it was fairly easy to get around in. Maybe it was the fact that I had to take my time and think about where all I was walking around, but I was really comfortable in Dublin, much more than I have been in Lincoln and Omaha even.

While in Dublin, there was a lot of attention paid to the Easter Rising in 1916. This revolution that happened a century ago this April seemed to be on everyone's mind, even those outside of the museums and tour curators. Just a hundred years ago, there were battles fought within this city over freedom and independence. This was shockingly different from everything else that I have seen and learned about here in Ireland simply because it was so recent. The more I keep learning about Ireland, the richer it's history seems to become to me.

One of the more stunning things that I wanted to touch on as well was the little bit of time I had spent at Trinity College. Just being on the campus was stunning, and thinking about actually attending lectures there kind of stunned me. Along with that, though, I toured the building where the Book of Kells is now held. The first bit of the building was interesting enough. It talked about the book's history, and how it would have been made and who it was made by. I even got in to see the Book of Kells itself, unfortunately it was turned to a page that was mostly text without a whole lot of illumination.

What was really stunning to me, though, was the Library they had on the top floor. You can see above just how jaw dropping the library was. The shelves were completely full of old texts, from all over the world, and from any number of authors and sources. The entire room even had the delightful smell of an old book, which was really the cherry on top of everything for me.

You could see in between the aisles of books that some had been pulled off the shelf for someone to read and work with. The busts alongside that you see were all rather important figures in scholarly work. The first three on the right as you walked in were none other than Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. Shakespeare made an appearance, as well as Newton. I had heard the phrase "Ireland is the land of Saints and Scholars" here a few times since I got in Ireland, but walking into this room solidified just how dedicated the Irish have been over the centuries to scholarly work. I was astounded.

While I didn't talk about all of the places I visited in Dublin, Dublin was still a lot of fun for me. I do want to go back again at some point in my life and see some of the other things that I didn't while I was there. It was a town unlike any other that I have ever been to, but in the best of ways. I feel like I saw another side of the Irish country and its people, one full of history much more recent than what is in America, and one that I did not expect to see.