IRELAND, DUBLIN'S GRAFTON STREET: DAVEY BYRNE'S PUB AND BEWLEY'S CAFE AND THEATER

 July 12, 2024

Many cities have "their street," the one that is associated with only that city and uniquely theirs--Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, 5th Avenue in New York City, Champs-Élysées in Paris, Downing Street in London. In Dublin, it is Grafton Street, a mostly pedestrian street that was a fashionable residential street in the 1700s, a dilapidated, crime-ridden street through the 1900s, and a shopping thoroughfare since the 20th century. It runs from Trinity College to St. Stevens Green, a distance of about 1600 feet. According to Wikipedia, it has some of the most expensive rent of any retail street in the world.

If you like people-watching and beautiful sites, Grafton Street is a great place to spend an hour or two, and compared to what we are used to in the United States, prices did not seem all that expensive.

The street is particularly famous for its buskers, and we saw at least a dozen. Most of them were unusually good. I was thinking, "Here's material for Ireland's Got Talent"!

IRELAND: TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN

 July 12, 2024

Bob and I like to visit famous universities. We've been to most of the biggies in the United States (Think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, etc.), and we've been to a few overseas (Think University of Heidelberg in Germany, University of Coimbra in Portugal, Oxford and Cambridge in England, Trinity College in Toronto, etc.).  We were excited to add Trinity College Dublin (aka University of Dublin) to our list.  

We started with a guided walking tour of the campus. Modelled after Oxford and Cambridge, Trinity was founded in 1592 by England's Queen Elizabeth I and is now home to 19,000 students. One of Trinity's specialties is English literature, and its program is ranked #1 in the European Union and 21st in the world. Literary luminaries who are alumni include Oliver Goldsmith, Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett. Four Presidents of Ireland and four Nobel Laureates are alumni.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) is engrossed in his book and hardly notices the many visitors who walk by him near the entrance.  George Salmon (1819-1904), a mathematician and a theologian who was also the college provost for a time, famously said, "Over my dead body will women enter this college." Maybe he felt that way because he had six daughters and Trinity College was the only place he could go to get away from them.

The iconic Campanile was being renovated when we were there.

NORTHERN IRELAND: ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL (ROMAN CATHOLIC) OF ARMAGH AND DOWN CATHEDRAL (CHURCH OF IRELAND) OF DOWNPATRICK

 July 11, 2024

We made our way from the Protestant Saint Patrick's Cathedral to the Catholic Saint Patrick's Cathedral and were amused to see the figure on The Bishop's Monument looking over the valley at the rival church. With his right hand raised in blessing and his left indicating the spire of his own church, he seems to be making a statement about which church is better.

To be honest, I have to agree with him. This cathedral was built in phases between 1840 and 1904 after the Church of Ireland appropriated the medieval Cathedral of Saint Patrick discussed in the previous post. This cathedral is a significant structure for Catholics, who have a relatively weak presence in Northern Ireland.

I love the Gothic style, including this arcade of apostolic statues.

NORTHERN IRELAND, ARMAGH: ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL (CHURCH OF IRELAND)

 July 11, 2024

It was time to get back on the road, so we headed south from Belfast in our rental car, a definite upgrade from the one that had broken down on us a few days prior.

I should reiterate here that I am so grateful for Bob's excellent wrong-side-of-the-road driving skills. He does a great job handling manual shifting with his left hand and staying on the left side of the road. (The rental cars have reminders for tourists posted on the windshield.)

On our way out of Belfast, we saw this huge piece of geometric art looming over the freeway. Google Image has helped me identify it as RISE, a sculpture designed by Wolfgang Buttress that consists of a geodesic dome suspended inside a 98-foot diameter sphere. According to Wikipedia, "The inner sphere represents the sun rising over the bogs and the outer sphere represents the sun's halo, while the angled, steel supports are to represent the reeds of the bog meadows that extended more widely across the area before it was developed."  Wow, I'm glad I have Wikipedia. I never would have surmised all of that by looking at it.

It's still a bit of a shock for me to see King Charles's face in place of Queen Elizabeth's. The Northern Irish seem to have made the adjustment just fine.