IRELAND, DUBLIN: IRISH WRITERS WALKING TOUR, PART I (OSCAR WILDE SITES, ST. STEPHEN'S GREEN, GUINNESS, ST. PATRICK'S PARK LITERARY PARADE)

 July 13, 2024

On our last full day in Ireland including an Irish Writers Literary Walking Tour that Bob had booked in advance with Tours by Locals. We highly recommend our guide, Adam Ladd, who was fantastic.  

We started out by paying homage to the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). We walked by the Giant's Garden Playground, named after a fairy tale written by Wilde called "The Selfish Giant." It tells of a giant who returns from a trip and finds children playing in his garden. Not wanting to share, he builds a very high wall to keep them out. His actions cause a continual winter to descend upon the garden, so not even the giant can enjoy it. When the children sneak back into the garden, the trees are so happy that they bloom and spring returns. The giant realizes the error of his ways and tears down the wall, making the garden forever available to all the children.

SOUTH AFRICA: BOOKS AND MOVIES

Before I continue with more posts about what we SAW in South Africa, I want to post about what I READ about the country. There is an awful lot of reading to do if you are interested in what's been written about South Africa and/or by South Africans.  These books I read in the last few months are just the tip of the iceberg.

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A good place to start reading about South Africa is The Covenant by James Michener.  This historical novel covers 500 years and the lineage of three families whose lives are intertwined: one native African, one Afrikaaner-Dutch, and one British. Michener gives a very good overview of South Africa's complex history. However, that complexity and detail leads to the biggest problem I have with this book, which is the same problem I've had with other Michener books--the brutal length. It's anywhere from 829 to 1200 pages long, depending on which size of type you get. I chose the audible version, which is 58 hours and 10 minutes long. I think that is the LONGEST book I have ever listened to, and I confess--I listened to it a 1.5x speed.    The.    Narrator.    Reads.    It.    So.    Slowly.    Even at that speed, it is like listening to FOUR normal-length books.   

I especially enjoyed the parts that included historical figures I had heard of, including Paul Kruger and Cecil Rhodes. Sadly, there is no mention of Nelson Mandela, who was sitting in prison during the period this book was written and had not yet become world famous. Published in 1980, the book ends while apartheid still had a strangle-hold on the nation. I wonder what Michener would have made of the human rights movements that led to the dismantling of apartheid more than a decade later.

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If Nelson Mandela is your hero, as he is mine, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela is a must. This is also quite a long book--684 pages for the version I read. I took me the better part of our trip, but it was worth it. I especially like this quote from the forward, written by President Bill Clinton:

"Tell me the truth. When you were leaving prison after twenty-seven years and walking down that road to freedom, didn't you hate them all over again?" and he said, "Absolutely I did, because they'd imprisoned me for so long. I was abused. I didn't get to see my children grow up. I lost my marriage and the best years of my life. I was angry. And I was afraid, because I had not been free in so long. But as I got closer to the car that would take me away, I realized that when I went through that gate, if I still hated them, they would still have me. I wanted to be free. And so I let it go."

In a nutshell, that is who Nelson Mandela is. The book tells you how he became that person.

I loved learning about Mandela's Xhosa childhood and the steps he took to become a lawyer in Johannesburg. He covers at length his entry into politics and the anti-apartheid movement. He throws out a lot of names that are unknown to me and hard to keep track of, and that gets a little tedious, but those people are an important part of the story. The narrative covering his 27 years in prison is fascinating, particularly as he works through the emotional and psychological aspects of being behind bars that long. I am struck by how he befriended other prisoners and many of the guards. And of course, the last sections about his release and the building of a new government are very interesting.

SWEDEN: STOCKHOLM

We visited Stockholm on a rainy day, just a few days before midsummer, the longest day of the year, and the day after students began their ten-week summer vacation. We weren't thrilled with our Swedish guide, who drove us around a lot and pointed out "important buildings" instead of turning us loose. Still, we could see even through our rain-splattered bus windows that the city has a lot of charm:

 

We liked this snake drawn on a bit of concrete plastered to an outside wall.

Gotta love this version of St. George and the Dragon, with the spiny, skinny dragon and the valiant horse.

What? A Christus in the window?  You mean the Swedes borrow from the DANES? (They don't seem too fond of each other.)

Miniature street art

In all that driving around, we did learn some interesting things from the guide:

* As in most of Scandinavia, only 2% of Swedes attend church.

* Half of TV programming for kids is in English, and a lot of adult programming is too. It is a very effective way of supporting English instruction in the schools, which begins in third grade.

* Swedes are very proud of one of their native sons, Botanist Carl Linnaeus. Our guide told us the inscription on his statue reads, "God creates; Linnaeus puts it in the right order."

*Gay marriage is totally legal in Sweden. Churches have to perform gay marriages or they can't perform any marriages at all.

*Swedes have a 30% income tax, and rich people pay more.

*Danish women drink beer in public; Swedish women NEVER do. (As noted earlier, Swedes look down their patrician noses at the Danes.)

*Women are given a one-year maternity leave with the guarantee of getting their old job back.  Sometimes they get eighteen months.  Grandmas generally take care of the children.

*All women over 40 work.

 * The minimum work holiday is five weeks, and it is fully paid.  For long-term workers, vacation time may be seven or even eight weeks/year, and workers can "bank" weeks for use in future years.

We saw two main sites in our short, wet stay in Stockholm.  The first was the wreck of the Swedish Warship Vasa.  Its maiden voyage in 1628 lasted less than a nautical mile before it sunk.  Apparently, everyone knew the ship had problems, but no one wanted to speak up.  The ship was pulled up out of the sea beginning in 1956, and over the next eleven years, 14,000 pieces were salvaged.  It has been rebuilt in a huge barn-like building, an enormous, elaborate monument to a colossal error in judgment:

 The most mystifying thing in the museum was this picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian:

 The second site we visited was City Hall, the site of the annual Nobel Prize Banquet.  The spire on City Hall is topped with the Three Crowns, Sweden's national emblem:

Dinner occurs in the Golden Hall at fancy tables with fancy dishes:

There is a fancy red velvet chair in the corner where Prize recipients sit to be interviewed:

I would love to sit in this chair for an interview.  What are my chances?

 The building itself is magnificent, from its ceilings:

. . . to the views out the windows:

. . . to the walls themselves:

At the end of the day, we hopped on the cruise ship and navigated past a few of 25,000 Swedish islands on our way to Finland:

READING:
This novel isn't really about Sweden, but A Man Called Ove (pronounced OO-vuh) was written in Swedish by the Swedish author Fredrik Backman.  It was a #1 bestseller in Sweden, and in the summer of 2014 it was translated into English and published in the United States. I must confess it is the only Swedish book I've read that I'm aware of, and so I think it's worth adding it to this post. Besides, I absolutely LOVED the book, and I need a place to share it!

Ove, a curmudgeon of the -nth degree, is a recent widower. He lives in a planned community and is constantly monitoring his neighbors' behavior and finding it lacking. At about the same time that a mangy, half-dead cat decides to move into his yard, new people move into one of the houses on his street, a family headed by a somewhat passive computer programmer and his very strong-willed Iranian wife who won't take no for an answer. I can't say much more without spoiling the story. Read it for yourself.

COMING UP: I'M NOT FINNISH-ED YET!!!