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.

CANADA: TORONTO, THE TRINITY COLLEGE NEIGHBORHOOD

September 28, 2018

(NOTE: The only advantage of not being able to travel because of the COVID pandemic is that it gives me some space to go back and catch up on recording some of our previous travels that I had not been able to get to. This is one such trip.)

In September 2018 Bob had a Friday business meeting in Toronto, Canada. I wanted to go along, so we decided to add an extra day, then fly home on Sunday. We took a red-eye flight from LAX to Toronto, arriving at 6:46 am. We had time to check into our hotel and shower before heading to Bob's meeting, which was held at Trinity College, part of the University of Toronto.

While Bob was in his meeting, I had a couple of hours to wander around. I started by going off the campus to see what was nearby. 

1. The Church of the Redeemer is an Anglican Church that was built in 1879. Sadly, the church administration had to sell of some of its land in the 1980s, and a massive Four Seasons Hotel was built on the property. However, the money from the sale allowed the church to remain solvent and to complete necessary renovations.

It doesn't have a particularly spectacular interior, but it does have some really beautiful stained glass windows. They were gifts to the church during the early 20th century.

The central window behind the altar depicts Christ on the Road to Emmaus.

These are the windows on either side of the above window. They show scenes from the life of Christ and parables: Christ and the children, Christ in the house of Mary and Martha, and the Good Samaritan.