When tourists come to Dublin, I can see they line up to go to all the famous sites of the city – the Dublin Castle, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Temple Bar, and at Trinity College, the famous Book of Kells and the Long Room at the old library.
Those things are all pricey, and I’m not sure how much my life would have been enhanced by my visiting any of them.
My best memories of Dublin will have come from my simple walks around the city and my chats with some of the locals. Sure, I went to Temple Bar, an area packed with pubs and restaurants, to look around and experience the music vibe, but I took my stew and Guinness a few blocks outside of the tourist area where it was half the cost and I could read my James Joyce novel in peace or chat with the locals. That’s how I met the Galway girl, with hair of black and eyes of blue.
I did make my way to Trinity College, but I skipped the tourist sites and gift shop and simply walked the grounds. Imagine! This was the university attended by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. Jonathan Swift studied arts, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and philosophy here back in 1682, when Trinity College was already ninety years old. To walk in the footsteps of those great writers was a joy.
While tourists took in the Book of Kells, I admired the University’s parks, the ivy growing up the sides of the buildings, the junk collected in a lab window, and, most intriguing of all, I watched some workmen replace cobblestones along a walkway, something I would never have seen in Canada.
But my greatest joy so far has been the two hours I spent in an antique store, sifting through hundreds of old postcards. I bought twenty-three of them – best ten Euros I’ve spent so far – with notes from travelers to their loved ones back home in Ireland in the early 1970s. Some postcard texts are funny- “I am hoping to have a good time” – and others provide insight into the lives of the Irish of the day – “this is the hotel I’m working at on the border of Germany/Austria; it’s lonely, but the people are extremely nice to me.”
This is the Dublin experience that appeals to me.
