The Last Day in Dublin
Saturday, 3/10
Saturday was probably the nicest morning of the entire trip—sunny, slightly warmer, and a bit less windy than the previous week. The first part of our last day in Dublin was spent wandering around the north side of Dublin, just north of the river, and making our modest contribution to the local economy. We got some photos of James Joyce’s statue, and that of Daniel O’Connell, as well as the GPO and the base of the Spire of Light. We wandered into a few fabric stores, one of which was called “Hickey’s” (not making this up), had a bagel in one of the innumerable shops, and found ourselves on Bachelor’s Walk, right along the river. Purely by chance, I found a bead store, and as I have recently begun thinking that I may need to take up dealing to support that particular habit, I had to go in. (In the “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” category, the place ships to the US if your order is over a certain minimum.) We crossed back over the Ha’penny Bridge, dropping in on the Forbidden Planet science fiction/comic shop as we headed back into the southside. We wandered through a square and checked out a couple of the funky little shops.
That afternoon, we hied ourselves off for a last does of edification at the National Museum of Natural History, which is, without a doubt, the creepiest museum I have ever been in. It’s as much a museum museum as a natural history museum, if you get my meaning. It doesn’t seem to have changed very much from its opening in Victorian times, and is packed full of insect-y things pinned into glass cases; pale, squishy-looking things in large glass jars, and a staggering array of fauna and sometimes, their detached heads, taxidermied within an inch of their…well, lives, isn’t really the right word, is it? All of this is documented by cards that have been neatly typed on now-antique typewriters, or documented in the excruciatingly neat handwriting of a corps of forgotten but dedicated and anal-retentive taxonomists.
The ground floor highlights Irish wildlife, complete with massive skeletons of the extinct Giant Irish Deer, a large, disproportionate-looking giant sunfish, and an eel that choked on a frog. A basking shark hangs from the ceiling, and there are in-habitat displays of some of the mammals and birds. I couldn’t help but hear the Arrogant Worms’s “Mounted Animal Nature Trail” playing in my head.
The first floor (which is one floor up from the ground floor, as is common in Europe) is a general exhibition of “international” animals, which is where a staggering array of megafauna have been stuffed and crammed into cases. Several of them are also out on daises, such as the giraffe and the walrus, along with disembodied heads mounted on all four sides of the square pillars that stretch to the lower gallery. From the open ceiling three stories up hang the skeletons of two whales that beached themselves decades ago. The southern wall features a display of birds that died along the Irish coast in the course of their migrations. Or should that be attempted migrations?
The Lower Gallery, which is simply a walkway all around the perimeter of the second story, shows the evolution of vertebrates. There’s an interesting display of nests, as well as the skeleton of the dodo that was the model for the drawings in the original printing of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Unfortunately, the model appears to have been rather overweight and not in the best of health at the time is sat for the picture.
The Upper Gallery, a walkway all around the perimeter of the third story, shows the evolution of invertebrates, with beautiful seashells in cases next to parasites best not thought about. It also has the only contemporary exhibit in the museum, which shows the photos of animals that are now extinct in Ireland, but still found in other places. The photos were taken by various Irish celebrities, and it had the expected conservation subtext worked into the photographers’ comments about how amazing it had been to travel to foreign parts and see these magnificent animals.
From there, we went on to Archbishop Ryan Park, in Merrion Square. It’s laid out as an English garden, generally, but also has a heather garden, playground, and display or working antique Dublin lampposts. There’s a statue of Oscar Wilde lounging on a large rock on the northwest corner of the park, along with two square columns, each topped with a small statue, with Mr. Wilde’s quotations scrawled on glass in colored marker in various handwriting styles.
Dinner that night was at Ocean, in the Grand Canal dockyards, and very pleasantly close to our hotel. Along with Queen of Tarts, it was one of my favorite places to eat. It’s small, and it was a bit too chilly and windy to eat outside, but the walls are glass, so it was the next best thing. The entire place is very contemporary, with brushed nickel, pale wood, and living room-type furniture rather than tables and chairs. The food was amazing; I had an enormous seafood salad with lots of vegetables, topped with tiny shrimp in a creamy sauce, a raw oyster, smoked salmon, and what I am fairly certain were pickled herrings. We sat looking out at the dozen or so sky cranes in the immediate area, the light-up sculpture across the dockyards, and the sunset. It was a lovely ending to our visit, and the last relaxing time we had until we arrived back in Indianapolis.
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