Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

We started our day off with breakfast at a little restaurant around the corner. A Full Irish breakfast and Irish Breakfast tea for me. Quite tasty, and not as heavy as I remember.

It started to rain as we set out in earnest, so we got out our rain gear and walked over to Trinity College. We took the walking tour given by a current Trinity student and ended up at the library where the Book of Kells is kept. Since you can only see a few pages of the book, there's an entry gallery with in depth explanations of the motifs in the book and the techniques used to create them. Unusually good for an entry gallery. The old library at Trinity is housed in the Long Room, which is a single... long... room. Over 200 feet long, with many times that much shelf space. It's gorgeous. Oddly, the books are arranged by physical size, rather than by content, which makes it more of a showplace than a useful library.

After stopping to buy a touristy hat (since keeping my raincoat's hood up is kind of a drag), we continued on to a couple sections of the National Museum, the Archaeology and Natural History wings.

Archaeology has a lot of interesting artifacts starting from the stone age and proceeding through bronze, viking, and medieval (there's also an Ancient Egyptian wing, but I skipped it). Tinny was particularly interested in the bodies that had been found in bogs. I thought some of the detail work in the goldsmithing was amazing, and it was interesting to see really ancient tools and weapons. The building it's housed in is amazing as well, with plenty of decorative ironwork and stucco.

Natural History is like a monument to the Holocene extinction. Maybe it's that I've been reading a book about mass extinctions, but seeing so much taxidermy of exotic species drives the point home.

On the way back to the apartment, we answered the question: which is faster, me walking or the Chunskis on a tram? Me.