It’s Long Weekend Trip time!! Sometimes those wonderful long-distance trips make me forget that there are so many interesting places nearby that I’m always meaning to visit, and one of those is Ireland. So I’m starting with a short trip to Dublin!
I arrived in the afternoon and was surprised by the bitterly cold, sharp wind -the official temperature is a perfectly reasonable number but it feels so much colder! Thankfully, I’m staying right in the city center, so I was able to get off the airport bus, turn a corner, and literally walk right into my hotel -not that I stayed for long!
You see, I have tickets tomorrow to see The President, a play starring Hugo Weaving, and as it turns out the Dublin International Film Festival organized an interview/talk with him today at 4PM! So without even unpacking my suitcase I left the hotel and took off to The Complex, a vaguely named art warehouse-venue-gallery kind of space. The walk there was straightforward but SO COLD due to the chilling wind around the river. Once there, I was annoyed to find you could only buy tickets to the talk online, but after resentfully typing away my credit card details on my phone out in the cold, I was able to get in.
The talk was really interesting, hosted by an RTE journalist who started out with very general questions that made me doubtful but then redirected to more specific questions about Weaving’s filmography. He seems like a fascinating person -having grown up in Nigeria, South Africa, Australia and I don’t know where else, not to mention all the accomplished filmmakers he’s worked with. It’s made me even more eager to attend the play tomorrow!
The event finished after about an hour, so I was back on the streets. I took refuge in a coffee shop to have tea and a brownie (it was called “Decadent Brownie”, and it was) and then moved on to my next destination: the National Gallery of Ireland! There are a lot of museums in Dublin that I want to check out, but most of them close at around 5PM or thereabouts; the National Gallery stays open until 8 on Thursdays, so it was a perfect fit for my plan!
The gallery occupies three floors inside a large building, and the collection is delightful, especially when you take into account that admission is free! The first thing I did was run to room 20 to try to see “The Meeting on the Turret Stairs”, a 19th century painting of which I have a print at home, but I was flabbergasted to discover that it only opens for one hour on Thursday mornings and one hour on Sunday afternoons; the rest of the time it stays locked inside a box. Which means I won’t get to see it at all!
I undertook the rest of the visit with resigned calm. The rooms with medieval religious art did not capture my attention, but the later periods sure did. They have several pieces by Goya, Vermeer, Caravaggio, I think I saw a Rembrandt? A rich collection by any standard, encompassing several centuries of European art.
There was also a gallery with contemporary portraits that strongly reminded me of the BP Portrait Awards at the National Portrait Gallery, which I mean as an enormous compliment! Lots of beautiful modern portraits, including some by children of various ages. The rooms themselves were often an attraction as much as the paintings, with some looking like wide ballrooms converted into art galleries.
I was also sure to check out the museum shop, wonderful as museum shops so often are. I may or may not have bought souvenirs already, even though it’s my literal first day. But how am I to blame if nice things just fall into my path?
When I got out of the museum it was pitch black outside, with a bright full moon shining from the sky, even though it was shortly past six thirty. I took a walk around the central district around Grafton Street, checking out a couple of shops and looking for a place to have dinner. There are of course millions of restaurants, but in such a central location, they were all packed to the rafters. I ended up at a Bunsen burger joint, which hit the spot.
It’s funny how much the streets and architecture remind me of London, after having spent so much time there. The city center looked to me like a procedurally generated Bloomsbury!
That’s it for a pretty complete first afternoon in Dublin. Tomorrow I’ll have an entire day to play with!
This Is A Lake 