A grand day out in Dublin with an Editing Colleague (in which there are plenty of geeky editorish thoughts)

This post should have a variety of interesting photos, and is only half written. But it's hard to do this well in noisy pubs and I'm discovering that a lot of wwoof hosts don't keep much internet in Ireland. So... here's what I got done this morning before anyone came down. (then the host came down and we had a nice chat, and then I took Yarrow sightseeing in the new old car)

A grand day out in Dublin with an Editing Colleague (in which there are plenty of  geeky editorish thoughts)

We had the grandest day ever out with Eamon Mag Uidhir in Dublin yesterday (just to solve the mystery for others who wonder, his last name is pronounced roughly like the anglicised version of it, Maguire). While I'm at it, the E in Eamon is mostly silent (say Amon with a long A). "E"s do tend to be silent in a lot of words in Ireland, but in front or the middle of things (e.g. teach is "tak") whereas in English it's usually trailing "e"s that are silent. And "h"s usually mean that whatever letters come before (perhaps a g) are silent (like in our light and night). I have asked a few people for a pronunciation guide for Irish but there doesn't seem to be one. Yarrow and I have some fun trying to guess how to pronounce the words on the road and other signs.

Eamon gave me a children's book produced in the 20s (on newsprint with the cover glued on) with all the writing in a lovely gothic script, and mostly it had dots above the silent letters instead of "h"s after. That was easier to understand. Eamon explained how the printers decided to go to the regular English alphabet fonts, which has changed somewhat how Irish is written. He had trouble reading his kids' schoolbooks as they were written differently to the ones when he was in school. There are a lot of tricky rules to Irish and I wonder if the modern generations will simplify it, but Eamon said no, plenty of languages have tricky rules. I can't really argue with that! Irish would be something we'd enjoy learning more of, we think.

First good thing to know: if you're driving into Dublin, don't. (I learned this twice on my previous two trips, once when I was driving and once when my host's brother was driving -- traffic in Dublin is horrendous. Slow and not fun.)

What to do instead: park at a park-and-ride facility and take the tram in. It's a half hour or so journey and was a bit crowded so we had to stand the whole way, but it's vastly shorter and more pleasant than driving that distance would be (as I said, I've already proved this to myself twice). In the tram (the same kind of unit as Calgary's C-trains), the stops are listed on the wall in Gaelic, which sometimes resembles the English and sometimes not at all. Luckily, they also announce the stops in English!

(Perhaps worth mentioning that we also got lost on the way to the motorway at 7:30 in the morning coming from Tullow, the country town we're currently staying near. We also got lost on the way home. Signage in Ireland is mostly based on the idea that you already know where you're going... if you don't, it's not terribly helpful, and when you realize you've unexpectedly gone off track, the iPhone with its Google map and 3.ie free internet is a great thing to have!) In Italy we blamed the roads on the Visigoths. Here in Ireland, Yarrow says the road system is the Vikings' revenge on anyone who didn't want to get around by sea/river.  We've been working on a post about driving in Ireland... but I digress. Back to Dublin and our wonderful day with Eamon.

Eamon very chivalrously met us at the Jervis tram stop and I surrendered most of my geographical thinking for the rest of the day and just followed and looked and listened and enjoyed.  On the walk from the train station to an amazing breakfast at the Kilkenny shop near Trinity College (remember that one, mark it down, you WANT to try the restaurant in the Kilkenny shop, definitely the best Irish breakfast we've had ever), Eamon told us about the architecture and the development of the various neighbourhoods. For example, Temple Bar had come about because the bus company had bought up all the derelict buildings down there, hoping to make a bus station, but by the time they accumulated all the real estate, downtown bus stations were out of fashion, so a group was formed who had the task of finding cool and artistic tenants. So there's a rock music centre and a few artisans here and there, but, with some disgust, Eamon said it's mainly turned into bars and cafés and people come over from around Ireland and England and drink themselves silly for three days on hen parties and whatwhat and whatnot. Yarrow and I weren't sure that was so terrible, it looked like a reasonable place and it is certainly getting famous.

We also saw a very grand red market building and some other buildings and Eamon explained the history of how originally, the wealthy folks in Dublin built nice neighbourhoods for themselves and everyone else lived in slums, but then, in the 1720s, there was some centralized money to make improvements and large buildings and they made a huge beautiful red brick market and some other huge beautiful buildings.

(You know, every time I type neighbourhood, I think how lovely it is to spell in Canadian, just Canadian, and even Britishise it a little and not have to take the "u"s out to maybe Americanize it... (or I would have normally spelled that Britishize with a z in Canada, but Canadians can also choose the -ise ending and now I am doing that more to mesh better with European English whereas before I spelled it -ize to mesh better with American English.) It's really interesting how little thought processes like this change when you move around).

In all the day I did manage to ask one question Eamon didn't know the answer to, which is where the red earth for the bricks came from. But he knew a myriad of other tiny and large details and history and everything.

We went to Trinity and looked at the line up to see the Book of Kells (and decided, oh well, some other day!). And then we looked around Trinity. Eamon explained how Queen Elizabeth (of 16th century) is thanked in the grace of every meal in the dining hall in Latin. She's the one who put the money up to found the incredible large buildings there. And he told us about taking first year English classes in the Chemistry hall, and also about climbing over the (slate!) roofs of one of the buildings one night (likely inebriated) to get into the Trinity Ball after he'd graduated, since only students can go to the Trinity Ball. Then he put on his bow tie, all James Bond like, and joined the party.

We did the museums, too. We got to the Science Centre, which had some awesome discoveries -- mushrooms and cloned-cell hamburgers, for starters, the Natural History Museum, saw the Celtic gold at the National Museum, and saw the Da Vinci sketches at the National Gallery. All of those are free to get into ! Isn't that great?

There were many more splendid things to tell, but I must get off the pub internet, I think. Noisy pubs aren't a great place when you want to write.