Day 45

Well, you'll have to wait for the pictures, as I seem to have misplaced the cord that connects my camera to my laptop. Not to worry, though; I'll probably spend most of tomorrow engaged in an epic quest to find it.

So on my first full day in Dublin, I woke up before 7:30 so that I could partake of the hostel's complimentary light breakfast. This breakfast was not light. If hotel breakfasts are 'light,' this one was anorexic. You had the options of either orange juice or water with toast spread with either jam or butter. My brain could hardly contain the vast array of possibilities! Anyway, I ate and went back to my room to find the other eight people in it still asleep, and crept back into bed to try to sleep until 8:45. However, my body had decided that it was awake, and no minor thing such as sleep deprivation was going to keep it down.

Religion seemed the best answer, so I got up, got dressed, and went to Christchurch Cathedral. There's been a place of worship on the site since 1080 CE, which is a long time by any measure you care to name. I wandered around, admired the reliquary containing the supposed heart of a saint and the brass lectern (with holes drilled in it, as medieval Bibles were chained to prevent the theft of such a valuable printed or handwritten book), before descending into the crypt. The crypt had a macabre display of a mummified cat and rat. The cat had chased the rat into an organ pipe in the 1800s and gotten both of them stuck, and both of them died in the pipe. Now they have a equally undignified afterlife where they're gawked at by tourists such as myself for eternity. I went to the coffee shop, known as the Foxy Friars, in the crypt and had a hot chocolate. There are few weirder and more enjoyable pastimes than enjoying a delicious hot chocolate served in a gigantic Jack Daniel's glass while in a 12th century crypt.

I left the church and went to Cafe Shannon by the hostel for lunch, where I had a ploughman's. A ploughman's lunch was the traditional lunch of rural workers in the UK and Ireland, consisting of: a crusty white bread roll, several blocks of cheese (cheddar or Stilton being the mains), a pickle of some sort (pickled onions are surprisingly good), an apple, and a pickle relish. It sounds like a motley assortment of food items, but when you have bread, cheese, and pickle relish all in your mouth at the same time, and then follow it down with a bite from the apple: Heaven.

After eating, I trekked down Dame Street to Trinity College for the Book of Kells exhibition. The Book of Kells, for those who don't know, is a masterwork of Western calligraphy and Irish illuminated manuscripts. It combines the usual Christian iconography with the interlaced bands and spirals of Celtic art to form something wholly new, and it does it in style. The Book's very survival is something of a miracle; the Kells Abbey was plundered several times by Viking raiders in the 10th century, and in 1007 records from the county Ulster record that a Gospel reputed to be a treasure of the Western world was stolen in the night. Luckily it was found a few months later hidden underground.

The cost of the ticket was worth it. The Book is breathtakingly beautiful, and not just for the quality of its art, which is tremendous, but also for the incredible labor of love it represents. All the blue dye in the Book is made with lapis lazuli, which could only be mined from one specific mine in Afghanistan at the time of the Book's creation. Furthermore, no embellished first letter in the entire Book is the same. There are thousands of them, but whatever monks did the illumination wanted this book to be unique beyond anything else. I also loved the title of the exhibition, which was Turning Darkness into Light. The title comes from a poem written by a 9th-century anonymous Irish monk, which I loved so much that I've typed out here for you:

I and Pangur Ban my cat
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will
He too plies his simple skill

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

Patience every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light

Reading the poem gave me one of those chills of historical commonality, where you really realize that people a thousand years ago, no matter that their understanding of how the world works was different, were fundamentally the same as you. They had pets and dreams and hobbies, laughed at dirty jokes and tried their best to get out of work. So often with people in the past we think of them as archetypal figures: the humorless monk or grubby peasant.

After the Book, I ascended the stairs into Trinity College's Library, which may well be the most beautiful library in the world. It has a barrel vault ceiling which lets in enormous amounts of light, and marble busts of famous figures glower down at you from on high. There was an exhibit there on the 1641 Protestant Depositions, which I decided to take in. I'm not even going to attempt to sum up the insane complexity of Irish Protestant-Catholic relations for fear of offending somebody (as I know I will), so instead, just the facts, ma'am. The depositions were testimony of alleged atrocities perpetuated by Catholics against Protestants in the wake of Protestants settling land formerly owned by Catholics. Several of the letters and such were impenetrable to me, but once I moved down to the propaganda section, I was quietly and squeamishly impressed by how many atrocities propagandists could think up for 'Popish knaves' to inflict upon Protestants.

When I left I realized that it was 3:30, and thus teatime. I went to a shop called the Queen of Tarts for tea and scones, and while there ran completely randomly into Kemper, another girl from the Hendrix-in-London program. We passed a lovely evening together browsing shops, which made me realize how lonely I was. I'd been feeling like the narrator in Radiohead's ode to urban alienation, "How to Disappear Completely:"

That there
That's not me
I go
Where I please
I walk through walls
I float down the Liffey
I'm not here
This isn't happening
I'm not here

Tomorrow, you can expect actual pictures and a megapost, as I'm determined to finish up the tale of my vacation so that I can catch the blog up to the present day, instead of being two weeks behind.