~fag on the crag & the hag~

January 9th, 2008

Okay, I lied. I passed that silly Wilde statue again, and this time I couldn’t resist.

Having enough of closed museums, I decided today—scheduled to be a relatively dry day—I would walk the city. My goal was loosely to see Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, find Francis Street (purported to dripping with antique shops), and generally tucker myself out.

This is a lamp outside the “restrained opulence” of the Shelbourne Hotel.
Built in 1824, it still features hot towel shaves and cucumber sandwiches in the tea room.

I began about as far east as one can be—the area known as Trinity College, then headed south to St. Stephan’s Green, then even further south to a nameless (in tour guides) area not far from Dolphin’s Barn, then north up to Liberties, then back east to Temple Bar, essentially making a weird triangle shape and covering about four kilometers by the days end.

The traffic is so confusing (to tourists expecting cars from the opposite direction?) they offer a little help at the intersections:

I started by fetching coffee at Butler’s Chocolate Café, where with a cappuccino they give you a handmade chocolate (aka breakfast).

I traveled far down Clanbrassil to the Grand Canal, where I saw some cold swans, but only one curios shop, and that was abandoned. Interesting to see this area though—Pakistani, Indian, Scruffy Hipster–all living side-by-side. Not a tourist for days.

I saw: an old woman in a red plaid dress feeding pigeons and talking to them in Gaelic, the birth place of fictional character Leopold Bloom, sprung from the head form Joyce as he was, a pizza joint called Pinheads, a gaggle of Irish school girls just out of class and sounding great, and a poster for something called Menopause—the Musical! (yikes!)

All over Dublin you’ll find these mosaics in the pavement–the Mission District of San Francisco has them too–and from the basements below the light streams in, muted and multicolored.

I finally found Francis Street—and I do mean finally found—the same street here can have a different name block-to-block on a map, and also be called something else entirely on the street sign, if you are lucky enough to get a sign.

A one point today I stood at an intersection where the same street had four different names on the four corners, and later after circling round in the drizzle about three times in ever-widening arcs, I realized this was Francis.
The shops were both over-priced and fussy for my taste, so I headed to the cathedrals—Saint Patrick’s and Christ Church–which were lovely.

All that piety made me thirsty, so off I went to The Brazen Head—said to be the oldest pub in Ireland, possibly all of Europe. It is built on the site of a tavern dating back to the 12th Century and has had a clientele ranging from textile merchants to rebels and smugglers. Now they have olde Irish music on the jukebox and Jamesons and Bushmills on tap.

It began to rain again in earnest, prompting the man at the end of the bar to exclaim that Ireland would be “a great country–with a roof on!”

Ali arrived and we scurried off to a charming Italian place, Il Baccaro (we are trying to snarf all the international snacks we can before departing for Fondueland…).

A tile on the wall featured a rustic painting of a frog and read,
The mosquito said to the frog, it is far better to drown in wine than to live in water!