Sunday, January 31, 2010

dublin, day 2.

day number 2 (friday) in dublin was really fantastic, starting off with visiting more museums in the morning. apparently thursday is one of the biggest party nights in dublin (along with tuesday, i hear?), so everyone had gone out the night before so a slow morning was like heaven. we walked about fifteen for twenty minutes through dublin to get from our hostel to the first museum and at about ten in the morning it seemed like the entire city was hungover. groups of men were walking around chugging huge bottles of water and people seemed to still be wearing their clothes from the night before. it was pretty humorous considering it was a still just a friday morning. the irish sure do know how to party, i'll give them that!

we went to the national gallery of ireland first and spent about two hours there. i don't quite know how to describe how the time there was other than epic. i went alone through most of the building and got to spend some quality time with quite a few master works of art. the museum itself is made of kind of a combination of a few buildings, so it's fairly easy to get disoriented and the architecture changes completely depending on which wing you're in. the entrance is a bauhaus style building which i believe was designed by gropius himself in true bauhas fashion. it was really, really breathtaking since i'm such a sucker for minimalist design.

the gallery's extensive collection includes caravaggio, picasso, an entire gallery dedicated solely to jack b yeats' (brother of w b yeats) work, goya, gainsborough, van gogh, metsu, etc. etc, the list goes on and on and on. but arguably most significant is that they have a vermeer! needless to say it was amazing. i didn't even bother trying to snap and photos incognito, but it was really magnificent to be able to see so much influential work, some by artists i probably won't be able to view in person again.



just a few photos taken outside the gallery afterwards. steph and mike are above.

housemate katie!

janine lookin' pretty sly.


obligatory feet photo. look at the dirty little toes of my moccasins - definitely need a washing.


after leaving the national gallery we headed over to the national museum to look at their natural history displays. they had a pretty extensive collection of ancient stonework, gold jewelry, leatherwork, amber, a huge wooden boat, textiles and weaving, bronze weapons and the like. perhaps most intriguing were the remains on display of five bodies found in the peat bogs. most of them had only been found in the last ten years but the bodies have been dated back to thousands of years ago. they have been amazingly preserved in the peat, a few still with hair and remnants of clothing or jewlery. the skin was all leatherly and had a brilliantly metallic sheen to it - really spectacular.





following are some photos of the human remains...








this man told us that since we were from the states we had to be sure to go to miami beach because that's where everything great is. we told him that we had no interest in going there but he was pretty insistent we make time when we go home. clearly he's never been to miami.

the river liffy.


katie and mike.




in the hellhole that is penney's.


lephrechaun paparazzi shot.

the temple bar! this was taken right outside of the hostel way stayed in. so beautiful!



here is everyone gathering to head to clare.

we left dublin at about 6 on friday evening. dublin was great for a lot of reasons but i was definitely itching to get back to ballyvaughan and it felt so so so good to get off the bus and be able to see the stars again and not hear any traffic and nobody in sight. truly a farm girl at heart.

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