Alright, here is Ireland part deux, as my sister and I headed East to Dublin and then on to Newgrange. However, the above pic is from the island of Inishmore which I forgot to post last time. I don’t even want to think about how much blood, sweat and tears it took to build all those stone walls, probably only to have them blown down every other year by a massive storm. I feel pretty privileged that I get to think about radar rather than piling stones day in and day out.
I had actually already been to Dublin the year before (see previous post here: http://bavarianbuzz.blogspot.com/2008/11/dublin-ireland.html), and Kiran had spent some there as well, so we sadly didn’t take any gratuitous shots of our perfect Guinness pints and had already done many of the attractions. We did however go on the Jameson Whiskey Distillery tour. Jameson is the best selling Irish whiskey in the world, although I prefer smokier, peatier Scottish whisky (note the spelling difference, with an extra “e” in the Irish adult beverage). Still, the tour was interesting enough and the tasting at the end was well, tasty.
Some of the older oak casks filled with the delicious amber-coloured good stuff:
The highlight of the tour was actually before it started when Kiran and I had a minor brush with celebrity. We saw the rock singer Pink! While waiting for our tour to start, a short woman came up to the entrance proclaiming “ Hi I’m Alecia and here is my boy”, introducing her muscled, tattooed companion. We got further confirmation seeing a poster advertising her concert happening the next day. I tried to be discreet and got this shot of her. Her and “her boy” got a private tour, but we did see them buying up a huge amount of booze in the gift shop afterwards.
More evidence, although kind of a crazy shot since it looks like her hands are on fire.
Ireland is interesting since it really is a bilingual country: English and Gaelic (or “Irish” as it’s called there). Sometimes though, I get the feeling that it takes a lot more syllables to get the same message across....
And another funny sign just outside our hostel:
Another Dublin sight we took in was Kilmainham Gaol (isn’t English a funny language!). I actually found an Australian website debating how Aussies should spell jail/gaol, and there were plenty of interesting responses including “I personally like the slammer or the big house...”, as well as this gem from one poster: “I dont beleive in either Jail nor Gaol. Its Prison or Correctional Centre. [sic]” And probably the one most reflecting my view: “I remember it as jail. I remember reading a Yankee book (Stainless Steel Rat?) when I was about ten and it was spelled gaol in there and I thought wtf?”.
OK, enough of that tangent, Kilmainham Gaol is a former prison in use from 1787 until 1923. Particularly during the potato famine, it was terribly overcrowded with up to 5 people (men, women and children, no segregation) in one cell of ~300 square feet (28 m2 for the metric users out there).
Our final tourist attraction in Ireland was a trip to Newgrange, which is the site of a vast Neolithic (i.e. stone age) necropolis. We visited two out of the three tombs which are a World UNESCO Heritage site. And rightly so: they were constructed ~3200 B.C., placing them 500 years before the pyramids of Egypt and 1000 years older than Stonehenge. No one is sure of the tombs’ original purpose: burial place for kings, centre for ritual or something else entirely. They must have had some pretty sweet engineers though, since the sites have withstood 5000 years of Irish rain using a complex drainage system to avoid even a drop of water penetrating the tomb itself. Not to mention great geologists, artists and astronomers to get the tomb alignments perfect so that they are lit only on special occasions (vernal and autumnal equinoxes and winter solstice).
Below are the restored passage tombs at Knowth, although you can be forgiven for thinking that the aliens had landed and disguised their mother and baby ships as giant mounds of grass.
Each passage tomb consists of a burial chamber reached by a long straight passageway lined with stones and within a large mound known as a cairn.
The enormous kerbstones lining the outsides of the tomb weigh 1-10 tons each (don’t ask me whether these are imperial or metric tons though), and are carved with various symbols whose meaning we can only guess. Below is the entrance to the Newgrange passage, which is precisely aligned such that it is only illuminated once a year on the morning of the Winter solstice, when - for 17 minutes - a golden light creeps in through a roofbox and lights up the chamber. The tour guides do a demo with a light bulb that hardly compares, but in order to be one of the lucky few to witness Winter solstice at Newgrange you have to literally win a lottery.
The Newgrange tomb is decorated on the outside with striking white quartz; I’d highly recommend a visit if you ever find yourself on the Emerald Isle.
And extra pics of this gorgeous country:
Next post will be more current stuff about Vancouver, I promise!
