Day Off - Dublin (Week II)

It was a beautiful day in Dublin today. Lots of sun and even with the crisp air it was a perfect day to visit the city.

I however only spend an hour our so in the day walking around the city and that was mostly trying to find another place to sit and do homework.

I got to the National Library of Ireland branch on Kildare Street a little after 9:00am. It’s a lovely old building with a gallery space on the first floor featuring an exhibit on the heritage of National Irish Library. The library is only open to people doing specialized research and who have permission to view materials in the manuscripts department. I of course did not have any of this going on but a very nice security guard John called up to the Manuscript reading room and the security guard up there, Tom said send me up and he was so very nice when I got up there. I spent the next three hours studying in this wonderful room with high, high ceilings and bright sunshine streaming in through the enormous windows that spanned the length of the room.

The library closed at 1:00pm and Tom was so sweet feeling terrible to have to ask me to leave. He suggested I go to the Trinity library and study there. He said it’s only open to Trinity students but if I showed them my beautiful smile there was no way they could turn me down. You have to love how friendly some of these older Irish men are and how charming they can be. I did go over to Trinity as Tom suggested but there was only a women security guard on duty and neither my smile nor any other non-Trinity student’s smile would have gotten past that door.

This very nice French man at the French Institute which is located next to the National Library branch was kind enough to recommend I go to the Trinity Science Gallery which is located across campus on Pearse Street. He said it has a nice café where I’d be able to sit and study. He was absolutely right. He’s getting his PhD. in geology at Trinity so I guess he was the perfect person to ask.

I made my way across the campus and found the Gallery. They have an exhibit on green energy going on at the moment and even the café holds part of the exhibit. The staff was kind enough to find me a comfortable corner to sit and work. I did indulge a bit since I was there and had a fabulously decadent hot chocolate and a cream filled croissant. The staff were all so sweet and my server is from Milan and she’s going to be getting her advanced degree in Art Management from Trinity next year. Valeria is her name and you can see her in this picture of the café cleaning up before closing. I was there for over three hours and they never rushed me to leave which I so appreciated.

I walked through the now misty air across the Trinity campus again and just marveled as I went at the beautiful architecture, the green parks, the sculpture of Sphere Within Sphere by Italian sculpture Arnaldo Pomodoro and also the Trinity kitty (TK for short.) I saw two different people feeding the adorable TK a little white cat with black spots (it looked like a cat wearing a cow costume.) One girl was feeding TK a can of food when I was heading toward the Science Gallery and then three hours later on my way back across campus TK was trotting happily behind a woman who was leading it to another meal. The picture you see here is very blurry but if you look closely you’ll see the shadow of the women walking next to a brown bench and then the kitty scampering right behind her to her lower left. I just loved this scene. It reminded me of Zaboo and how he always follows Arleen, his mommy, around the house like he’s attached to her by a string.

I met Jean Marie at Stephen’s Green shopping center. I love this building because it’s so unique. It’s an old train station, I think and they repurposed it years ago to be a shopping galleria and it works really well. Jean Marie spent the whole day shopping around at various places in Dublin. She did a great job finding lots of bargains. She’s really, really good at that.

She took me to dinner at this Chinese/Thai place near the hotel and then I was just too tired to do anything and I just wanted to go back to the hotel and go to bed early. I had hoped to see a play while I was in Dublin. There is an acclaimed production of Ibsen play John Gabriel Borkman staring Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, Lindsay Duncan amongst others. I’ve had the incredible pleasure of seeing all three of these actors on stage in New York and it would have been great to see them together in this play but when I went to get tickets it was already sold out. Oh, well, the late bird doesn’t get the worm.