Monuments and museums

With today being my last full day in Ireland, and I still had seen very little of the city. I started out away from the coast, toward the east with the vague intention of finding an old ruinous jail called Kilmainham. I had heard that this was a good place to get a wide view of Irish history. The location was actually off all the maps I had, so I wandered a good way in a very cold morning wind (sometimes gusting so strong I had to stop until it slowed again). Most of an hour later I was very close to giving up, until I spotted an old-looking building on a hill. I had no idea that this was it, but it was - and as it turns out, I took probably the most circuitous route possible to get there, since the return trip took about a quarter of the time as the journey out.

I arrived about half an hour ahead of the first tour of the morning, so I perused the museum while I waited. I find this kind of stuff sickeningly fascinating, and I have deeply ambivalent feelings about finding modern entertainment in this kind of ancient misery. Some of the exhibits were blandly creepy, such as a video mock-up of some guy who, back about a century ago, had developed some complex physics equations to calculate how much weight should go on the opposite end of the hanging rope to cause the quickest death possible; of course, this information was also used in reverse to determine how best to torture prisoners before death.

The tour started up in the museum with a guide who looked like a slightly less dashing Irish version of Che Guevara. He narrated the history of Ireland as we passed through the chapel where once a prisoner was married in silence just hours before facing the firing squad, along the old wing where debtors of the famine era had crowded into the prison for minor crimes (oft thought to have been committed sheerly to get the meager hot meals the jail provided - "If the prison does not underbid the slum in human misery, the slum will empty and the prison will fill," wrote George Bernard Shaw about the famine era), into the late Victorian wing where prisoners were thought to be best treated by total silence and isolation in which they could contemplate their crimes. Over all those old cells were names - Irish revolutionaries, names famous only to those who remember their history, names like Pearse and De Valera and Emmet. The tour ended in the exercise yard, where executions had taken place by hanging and firing squad, from the days when the British were putting down revolutionary sparks to the dark years of early independence when the Irish fought brother against brother in the civil war over how that independence should be created. Two black crosses at opposite ends are all that mark the place. The prison closed with the ed of the civil war in 1924 and was left to the elements, until the 1960s when restoration began in an effort to memorialize those who had died making Ireland a free nation.

But what struck me most was the cold. It was a bitter day to be sure, but walls there suck the heat out of you - and the windows that block the breeze now were not installed until the restoration. With no natural or piped in heat, the place was predictably riven with disease that preys on the crowded halls of starvation- and cold-weakened prisoners. I know that my people come from northern climates - the civilized world doesn't get all that much colder than northern Europe in the winter - and I wonder what makes my tolerance for cold little and limited. No one could be happy with that kind of cold for long, but still, shouldn't there be some memory of tolerance in my blood for the chilly lands I come from, or can the spoiling of mediterranean climates like California's ruin that tolerance in just a generation or two?

From the prison I went across the street under the clear blue sky and howling wind, to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, where I had lunch in a mercifully heated basement cafe. I should know by now that modern art should never make the list of things to do when traveling. It doesn't offend me, it doesn't make me shake my head at the fall of "real"art, but modern art annoys me. It always has. Especially mediocre modern art. The pieces on display in the only wing I visited were from a contemporary Latin American touring exhibit. A few were intriguing. A few were not. I don't care how artsy it's meant to be: preserved frogs stuck with spires and hung in a six-foot-radius circle of amphibians still smells like the uncleaned end of the anatomy lab. Ditto for the smaller-scale lizard version. And I probably could have died happy without seeing a giant picture of Che Guevara made of carefully arranged black bean soup, ya know. I spent a few minutes taking refuge from the cold in there, but quickly ended up moving on.

I walked back along the Liffey and up a hill toward the national museum. Once inside and up the first flight of stairs, I sat down on a wide stone window ledge. A young guy with a tag indicating that he worked at the museum walked by and glared at me. Great: another glaring dude. At least this one wasn’t shouting at me that he was staring because I was girl.

I started into the first exhibit hall, a totally random collection of individual pieces that had been pulled out of storage by various curators as their favourite pieces to put on display. Despite the lack of cohesion, it was actually rather interesting – bits and pieces from all over the world, firmly ensconced in thick glass. I was wandering through there when the Dude Who Glares walked past me and, once again, glared. At first I thought he was suspicious that I was touching the goods, then I remember that everything was behind unbreakable glass. He walked by me several more times, glaring every time, until once when I was standing in front of some tapestry, he finally decided to pounce. He walked up, and in a squeaky accented voice I could hardly follow, he spewed about four paragraphs of random information and unrelated without taking a breath and then said, “I could give you a tour if you want.” Oh no. I’d rather be suspected of stealing ancient artefacts that were rightly stolen from the homelands for the museum than have the squeaky-voiced glaring dude developing instant crush on me. I politely said no thanks and extricated myself as best I could. From there on out though, every time I turned a corner, there was the squeaky-voiced glaring dude, ready to pounce again, albeit with some of the worst pick-up lines known to mankind. “So what do you know about the Boer war? Do they have museums where you come from?” Since we had already established that I was from California, I took this last one to be the approximate equivalent of Americans who roam the world saying things like, “Oh, you have cars in Ireland?”

I’m never sure what provokes guys to act like that. I mean, when he first saw me, I was busy attempting to wrestle myself out of a couple of the approximately six concentric layers of sweaters and jackets I was wearing against the wind, which resulted in sleeves (with and without arms inside them) poking out in every direction like medusa’s braids. I know, I know what you're thinking, you don't even have to say it: what a hottie. But wait, it gets better. In the morning's bitter cold wind, I had been forced to put on a hat before my hair dried. There are bad hair days, and then there are days when I'm forced to put on a hat before my hair dries, and those are days when the hat never comes off. But it was too hot to wear it in the museum, so I was switching to a fleece headband when Glaring Dude first walked by, and he got the full view of my bangs plastered in flattened tangles all over my forehead. Let me tell you how much it pleases me to no end that men who decide to develop instantaneous crushes on me are inevitably so desperate as to find all that attractive.

Anyhow, I finally got tired of having to maneuver around this dude every time I turned a corner, so I moved onto the next attraction. I managed to get myself lost and turned around but still find what I was looking for before it closed: Dublinia, a somewhat cheesy but also very educational mock-up of Dublin during the Viking years. I was especially impressed by their life-sized models prominently displaying the enlarged, blackened lymph nodes of a person dying of the bubonic plague. But mostly what struck me is how not everything in Ireland in Irish, and in particular, the area around Dublin has long been a cross-roads of many different races come to trade and dominate and otherwise exist: Normans, Anglos, Vikings.

From there I went on to dinner, but not before stopping at an internet café along the Liffey – I find that I can only walk for so many hours a day, and at some point it’s helpful to actually make myself sit down for a time and do something that doesn’t require being on my feet. I had a quick dinner then found the same café as last night to have hot chocolate and to continue reading through the book I picked up yesterday, which reads like a fictionalized history of everything I’ve seen since I’ve been in Dublin. I went to sleep exhausted by ten, realizing that next time I come to Ireland I’ll have to make an effort to see a little more night life – which probably means doing a little bit less walking during the day. Next time.