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| Late evening, Dublin's spectacular James Joyce Bridge, aka The Harp Bridge for Ireland's national symbol. |
published July 8, 2012
First in series of four
by Paul Sullivan
Impressions of Ireland
It seems
unreal to think that 24 hours ago I was in the airport at Dublin,
Ireland, awaiting a plane
back to the States.
Half a
century of expectations went into that moment. Half a century of wondering
about Ireland.
We had spent eight days roaming the Emerald Isle in an effort to see just what
we guessed right...and what we had all wrong about this ancient land. Right or
wrong, we loved it all; would return in a heartbeat.
We have a
new dream now: to return someday and walk the legendary Dingle
Way-more about in a later column.
Impressions?
Right there you have one of my fondest-talking to people who had just walked
that 8-day trail among the rugged, weather-beaten windswept crags where sheep
still roam the same moors where iron-age man survived elements and invaders at
least a thousand years before Christ.
That’s on a
peninsula along this island nation’s west or Atlantic side. On the eastern side
of this Indiana-sized country of 6.1 million, Dublin
is another world.
Ireland,
as anyone who follows the news knows, is a member of the EU-the European Union.
A member whose economy is not doing well. With some one million inhabitants, Dublin
would seem to be the economic engine that drives Ireland.
But is it? I certainly wouldn’t know, but our impressions would put it the
other way around. Namely, that rural and small-city Ireland
seems to be in decidedly better shape than Dublin.
East-to-west,
we saw no real evidence of dire need outside Dublin.
Of course, appearances can be deceptive, but the country’s farms and
independent businesses certainly gave the impression that they were not
suffering.
We both
commented on what a cosmopolitan city Dublin
is. Typifying this, on our last night in country, we had dinner in a Mexican
restaurant sitting next to two German men, served by a Chinese waitress.
Dublin
serves up a rich stew of the very old and 21st century. Divided
by the River Liffey, the city has a lattice-work of bridges, centuries old and
strikingly new, both vehicular and pedestrian. It has an excellent public
transit network including light rail.
The
double-decker tour buses, with their hop-on, hop-off at will plan provided our
means of getting the essential overview. We liked ‘em so much we went back for
a second round.
Even at
that, Dublin has such a rich and
varied mix of sites to see that we saw but a fraction of it and could have
spent our entire time there.
Favorites-different
as they are-would be the Trinity College Library with its Book of Kells
exhibit, and the Guinness Storehouse.
The home of
Ireland’s
favorite drink is almost surely the single most popular tourist attraction in
the country. I’d bet on it. This masterpiece of marketing concludes with a pint
of Ireland’s
favorite export high atop its brewery in a glass-enclosed pub with what has to
be the most spectacular possible views of Dublin.
Tim signed
up for the Guinness Academy,
a 10-minute introduction on the proper way to pour a pint. And I must say,
there is a thing or two to learn, as he later showed me in a historic pub many
miles way, in a part of this story yet to come.
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