Gettin' some craic

Everything you have heard about Irish hospitality is true (as long as everything you have heard is good). I arrived in Dublin last Thursday; where I was to stay with family friends that I had never met before - I was blown away by their generosity in providing me with places to stay; giving me guided tours; feeding me & ensuring I got to and from the airport - it made for such an excellent trip to Ireland and was so much better than the impression you end up with of places that you visit alone.

I started my visit with a guided walking tour of Dublin, which is different to what I expected, which on reflection was Oxford only with more Guinness and shamrocks. As it was built in more Renaissance/neo-classical, rather than gothic/neo-gothic, it was somewhat different. Having an Irish tour guide made the history more alive - hearing about what family members did in the fighting in 1916, rather trying to resurrect my dim memories of 'Michael Collins' [the film - I have a clearer memory of our friend in Indonesia]. It was fascinating seeing and hearing about all the changes to Ireland, and Dublin especially, since joining the EU - house prices have certainly gone insane; with three bedroom houses in Dublin suburbs at something like a million Aus dollars.

You can walk through most of central Dublin in about three hours; and in this time you will see approximately 4000 pubs. The food there is excellent; lots of great seafood! And the bread! It is so tasty it makes you want to sit in a bakery and nibble bread until you die.

Now, as it was this that made me first incline to include Dublin in this trip, unsurprisingly I headed off to the National Library of Ireland for the Yeats exhibition the following day. The NLI has a huge collection of Yeats' papers, manuscripts, old passports and the like, and so sensibly decided that they should get them on display, and have put together an excelleent exhibition. When you first enter it has audio of poems being read out while the lyrics and related images are projected onto the walls - oddly the reading I liked least was the recording of Yeats reading, which was really strange. A later part of the exhibition describes how Y created a kind of music to be played during readings, so this may have been part of that as it was a sort of singing that seemed to be going on, but if that is the case, and hence that was how he normally read his work, wow would you be hoping not to be invited around for a reading of his latest...

The exhibition also had good images and videos on various aspects of Yeats life, and then heaps of the original manuscripts of his writing - Sailing to Byantium was a completely different poem at one stage before it got rebuilt. They also had Yeats' passport, which I am jealous of, as he travelled in the time when passports got stamped - thus far it looks like I'll be travelling right around the globe and coming home stampless. 's'not fair.

Then I headed off to the National Gallery - I think Irish art is like Australian in that if you don't know anything about it, superficially at least, it just seems like a bunch of people doing whatever is being done in Europe at roundabout the same time, except that you've never heard of them. Except for Jack Yeats, conveniently, as I both really liked his work, and it made for a nicely Yeats-ified day.

The next day I had planned to wander about Dublin some more but got a better offer, in the form of a drive into the mountains around Dublin and lunch at a pub that is a decade younger than the English settlement of Australia. The scenery half an hour out of Dublin is beautiful, feels distinctly 'Irish' rather than the city which minus the green decorations, could be almost anywhere. The pub was amazing - a couple of hundred years of accumulated detritus makes for some interesting décor. And excellent food was also present.

The following day we needed to deliver a merman to Belfast so I got an unexpected, brief, driving tour of Belfast and then returned via Newgrange & Knowth, which are fascinating - sites that have been in use by humans for 6000 years, and c.3000 AD became sites for neolithic burial chambers. Absolutely amazing as these chambers were built with materials that had to be imported from quarries far away, and were constructed so they light up once a year at a seasonal solstice, and they have largely survived completely intact and watertight up until the present.

And the following day I arrived in Paris!