Fáilte!

I'm picking most some a few of my favorite photos from my trip to share and blather about. There's going to be...a lot of blathering. A lot.

I started out, at about 6:30 on Sunday morning, wandering the streets of Dublin near Christchurch Cathedral, looking for someone with wifi I could bum to figure out where my hostel was, because I didn't look that up before leaving the airport wifi zone (oops). At least I'd looked things up before flying out, so I knew the cathedral was within about ten minutes of the hostel.

The downside, of course, is that I needed to know where north was to make use of that information. And the sun wasn't up yet. And I don't like just sitting around looking confused in unfamiliar places. So I picked a direction, found a Starbucks I never managed to even walk past again, borrowed their wifi and bought a tea (and oh my god is the tea they're using different? that stuff was stiff. It was perfect. [Not to mention in tea-drinking countries, they understand that the water has to be hot]), and found my way to Irish Home 1.0, where I dumped my luggage and set off immediately for adventure!

If religion were composed only of architecture and music, I would be a zealot.

Which is to say, the cathedral again. I accidentally attended the service, which made me cry—I understand, in a faint, papery sort of way, that the trappings aren't the crucial bit of religion, but they do help. Standing in a space the foundations of which were laid by people who knew neither they nor their descendants nor, likely, their descendants, would see the end of, listening to a choir singing in a space made for that song, is...transcendent, in ways my irreligious self didn't expect.

If nothing else, I love people, and I love the wonders we're capable of, and I love that we want so desperately for connection that we can and will make it with the ghosts of people with whom we might have shared little more than that longing.

And speaking of connection, I got invited down for tea and biscuits with the congregation by the lovely women on either side of me at the service, so got to see the crypt full of people (and be laughingly reminded not to talk to strangers).

Thanks, helpful crosswalk.

I appreciated the crosswalks—which are marked like this well outside the tourist center of the city—helping pedestrians not get run over by the staggering variety of wheeled objects careening around. Cars, yes; double decker buses, also yes; more bikes than I've ever seen in a city, yep; horse-drawn cabs, yes; many and varied homebrew vehicles, more yes. And the one-ways are frequently only so for the big stuff, so you still have to check both directions for bikes—though the bikers are adept at sudden turns and stops to avoid walkers.

People!! Made this!! With their hands!!

And then I went to another cathedral, because they're within view of each other, and I love them. This is St. Patrick's, which was built in the 12th century (roughly) and has changed rather little on the outside, though the inside is drastically different thanks to a 19th-century restoration underwritten by Benjamin Lee Guinness (yes, of those Guinnesses). Our tour guide said he had more money than sense, and a good thing for t'cat'edral it was, too.

It is a stunning building, and shockingly airy—one of the biggest changes made was the removal of the interior walls separating the transepts from the main body of the cathedral, and moving the organ from the bridge where it had lived, in front of the altar and across the width of the cathedral, to one of the upper galleries.

When I visited, they were preparing to hang thousands of little leaves from an art installation asking for people to leave memories of how war had affected them, and the guy lines for the leaves made a ghostly web across the vault of the ceiling.

Look at it.

I tried to take dozens of photos of the stained glass; it was a bright day, and the colors were wonderful, but for the most part, my camera couldn't see past the contrast of dark window well and bright window to catch the patterns. This was a lucky shot, and I'm so glad it captured the colored glass shadows, too. The whole cathedral was painted in them.

I spy...an organist!

And then, because Ireland was already delighting in bringing me to tears with beautiful things, the organist arrived and started playing. Warming up? Practicing? I've no idea, but it was lovely.

I love that the one that came out is of a harpist.

Another successful glass photo! I'd brought Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy as my trip reading, so the harpist in the window is especially appropriate.

Other people's normal city detritus is interesting.

I also walked as much of the city as I could reach, just sopping up a new place, and striking out into normal-people areas, rather than being surrounded always by other tourists. (Sorry, normal people. I know how that is.)

I love that there are no repeat door colors in this photo.

Did I buy two postcards with the lovely lacquered doors on them? Yes. Yes I did. They're so cheerful, and clearly I need a House of Many Doors in future, so I can implement the same cheery strategy against cloudy days. I also love that many of them have bright brass knobs in the center, sometimes with an additional handle at one side.

There is stained glass everywhere in this city, and I can't photograph it for beans.

I stumbled on Dublin Castle pretty much by accident, having walked around the block it lives on several times. The blocks are...not square. I'm not entirely sure they're Euclidean, actually.

This is the newer (by 'newer' we're talking like...18th century, at most recent) portion. The tall wall at farthest right is the 13th century section.

This sculpture is HUGE.

The garden adjoining the castle is an interesting mix of formal garden, sculpture park, Garda (police) memorial, and helicopter pad. For serious. I just learned that, trying to dig up the name of the artist behind this double-serpent sculpture—no such luck, but if you know the answer, I'd love to be in on it!

A tropical plant in the ground like that's a normal place to live!

This plant was everywhere! It's a castor bean. I actually know what those are, but was so discombobulated by not being able to identify plants in general that I didn't even guess at this one's identity. (Points to me for not touching strange plants, though I'm fairly certain you need to eat castor to get ricin poisoning.)

And then...I went inside, which (as the traditional point for video game cutscenes) seems like an excellent point to end this post.

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