Ireland Take 1

Greetings from old-new Dublin! Old in its history, new in the youth and vibrancy of its people. It's been a pretty amazing couple of days.

Thanks to the "Celtic Tiger" economy, Dublin (literally Dubh Linn, meaning Black Pool) is a high-tech town. I passed about 7 Internet cafes within a couple blocks on the way to this one, situated near my hotel and the light-rail system. Yesterday we got into town around 1:00pm and checked into our hotel. I had initially intended to travel solo, but my friend Jerry decided to come along at the last minute, so the two of us are in my pre-booked single room, which in Europe is even smaller than you'd expect. Fortunately we haven't spent much time in the hotel.

Day one was generally a walking tour of the City Center. Trinity College, establihed sometime in the 16th century, is an excellent looking university, with a fine courtyard and old stone buildings. The Old Library houses about 300,000 books, in a room the size of a football field with high vaulted ceilings. Also in this building is the Book of Kells, a 9th-century illuminated manuscript featuring the Four Gospels. The intricate characters and illustrations looked like they were made with colored pencils about a week ago.


From there we walked through St. Stephen's Green (the Dublin Central Park) and the Georgian section. This bore resemblance to the Olde City area of my hometown Philadelphia, with its red-brick townhomes and brightly-colored doors in the style of Oxford. Both areas date from the 18th century, so maybe it's not surprising.

The front page of the paper on Monday was about the Belarus elections, which has all the makings of another revolution in a former Soviet state. Lukashenko has a greater stranglehold on the government than his counterparts in Georgia and Ukraine, however, so I'm not optimistic. There was also a large article in Tuesday's paper about the power of Irish political blogging and its potential effect on the next election (the story is behind a firewall and requires a membership fee). At the Taioseach's (Prime Minister's) office there was a sign basically saying "There will be no tours today because we're busy," so I don't see a lot of transparency here. Of course, the Irish do have one up on us politically; the last two heads of state have been women, leading one of them (Mary Robinson, not the current one) to suggest that "Parents all over the country are telling their boys, maybe if you work hard enough, even YOU can become President!"

Last night we had dinner in a traditional Irish pub called Madigan's, where we enjoyed the craic (conversation) with a man who told us all about his trip to Las Vegas and his win on the Internet poker machine. Then we popped over to the Temple Bar, not one bar but a section of town with dozens of pubs and clubs. We noticed a proliferation of groups of young men and women, wearing matching polo shirts emblazoned with their favorite soccer or rugby team, jeans for the boys, skirts for the girls. There were the usual singalongs and general nuttiness. Great fun.

That's all for now. I brought the cords to upload some photos, but I have to figure out if the plugs are right. Hopefully I'll have pics up tomorrow.

Slainte!