Into the Heart of Dublin

after another phenomenal breakfast in our B&B (i swear I'd never eaten as well as i did with the Irish B&Bs), we got on a bus and headed into Dublin. That one step - that one idea of taking the bus rather than driving saved us more headaches and stress than i can even begin to explain.

our first stop was Trinity College in Dublin. It's a beautiful, ancient place that is cool in and of its own right. It's library was a football field long and looked like the library from Harry Potter or from Star Wars epidsode II (i'm a nerd, back off). But the reason we went to visit was to see the Book of Kells, which was something Kim was very excited about. in the early history of Christian Ireland, there was a large number of people who were illiterate. so monks and scribes would illustrate bibles in insanely intricate ways. it's gorgeous. The book of kells is just the 4 gospels of hte New testament. there are textual errors (imagine if it was your job to hand copy the bible - you can imagine a few written errors happening), but it's not important. these people loved what God said in his word and the literal translation wasn't critical. in my office now, i have a print of the first word of the Gospel of Luke. it is gorgeous.


after that we wandered around Dublin. our first stop was Christ's Cathedral. Awesome. I don't know how else to put it. Here is a church which has been continually in operation for almost 1000 years. 1000! I think CPC is old, at 60 years. 1000 years, this church has stood as a testimony to God's Glory and goodness. it was beautiful. and at the same time sad. it's a historical item, not a living breathing part of Christ's body. it's a museum. as is much of hte church in Ireland, and in Europe beyond. We also go to see St. Patrick's Cathedral and the place where he baptized most of his original converts to Christianity in Ireland (the next day, we would see where Patrick came and started his movement in Ireland - it was very close to Dublin.





we spent the rest of the day just tooling around Dublin. We did some shopping. Actually, and this is really really important. We bought my post precious souvenir in Ireland in Dublin. I had wanted one for along time, and finally found them. A Peterson pipe. Now Europe has gone slightly crazy in its anti smoking campaigns, and for probably 10 years now, smoking in public in Ireland has been illegal. So the number of places where one can buy a pipe has been reduced to this one store in downtown Dublin (and even it was incredibly difficult to find). I bought a pipe for me and for my friends Paul and Jared, who, if i'm going down with another bad habit, i'm taking them with me.

we had dinner at a cool place called "temple bar" - it's the entertainment district in dublin and then we did what was hands down our favorite part of the whole trip (even better than the whiskey tour). we joined onto a "traditional irish music pub crawl" which is exactly what it sounds like. We went bar hopping through the temple bar district to 4 traditional Irish pubs, (I even found a place called "the dubliner" which is the name of my favorite Irish bar here in cincy) and we were led by 2 musicians. One guy played guitar and bodhran (an irish drum) and another guy played fiddle and bodhran. they told stories and then performed the songs their stories were about and in the process showed us some of hte coolest little pubs in dublin (out of the way kinds of places) most of you know that i'm a huge fan of traditional Irish music, so this was a really really cool part of the trip.