Around the World in Thirty Days

September 18th - exploring Dublin like the crazy Vikings we've become.

We arrived in Dublin just before 5am, after not NEARLY enough sleep. Very impressed to see Andrew/Uncle Andrew waiting for us at that time of morning! His house is only about 10 minutes from the airport so we were there before it was light in the morning. He & Ramona made us some breakfast and we had time for a good chat before Ramona had to go to work. Andrew is taking the next few days off while we are in Dublin. Their house is a lovely little cottage with ivy-covered walls, and Andrew & Ramona made us feel right at home.

Later in the morning, we headed into the middle of Dublin for our introduction to the city, the Viking Splash tour. This is a monumentally silly but fun experience, with a bit of education thrown in. It’s a tour aboard a World War 2-era amphibious vehicle around the streets of Dublin and into the Grand Canal, with a focus on Dublin’s history - in particular the parts involving Vikings.

But what made it really special is that we had to wear Viking helmets and learn to yell like Vikings!

Once we had mastered this, we then had to assume that all other tourists, especially big groups on walking tours and the open-topped hop-on, hop-off buses, were Celtic warriors and therefore our enemies. So we had to bare our fists and yell “RRRRAAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!” at them. Yes, we got some attention... although all the locals are completely used to this by now and don’t even notice it.

We had a picnic lunch in St Stephen’s Green – it was sunny and fairly warm, so far we haven’t needed our rain coats at all!

Andrew then led us on a bit of a wander around Dublin, into a historic church called St Ann’s, and through Trinity College.

The university has many claims to fame, but the best-known must be the Book of Kells. This is a book containing the 4 gospels, produced by monks in the 9^th century. Each page is richly decorated and illustrated. There are 2 folios, in a glass cabinet – both are open so you can see 2 double pages; 1 which is mostly decorated text and 1 which is illustrations. There are 2 other books from the same era, the Book of Armagh and the Book of Durrow – these are smaller and not as well preserved but still amazing to see. No photos allowed in this part of the library.

The Trinity College Library has more to see upstairs – the Long Room is (as you would expect) a long room, containing around 200,000 books. It also has glass cases with displays of some other very old books, information about how the university preserves them, examples of pigments used in medieval times and so on.