Cultural Dublin

After having first Easter break from college, and then another week long own break to Finland, dates for exams were getting closer. It was easily noticed from few key features… Library was full of students and trying to find a computer to print something was a real mission impossible. Secondly, usually the coffee break at library might easily last bit longer than expected, for example 30 minutes coffee break might turn out to be few hour coffee break… Such productive studying! I also thought about the option to participate on my classes during last week, but for some reason it didn’t happen and instead I spend a few days to discover cultural Dublin before days actually ran out of my Erasmus exchange.

First I started to discover the history of Dublin itself. It all started at the age of Vikings who actually were the ones who founded Dublin around 9^th century. People quite often have a perception of Irish people being red headed, but actually the story tells that legacy of redheads is related to the time of Vikings. After Vikings, on 12^th century, Normans arrived who decided to stay several hundred years and built up castles to make them stay more comfortable and secured. This leads back into times when the Dublin castle was built. In these days Dublin castle looks more like a residence place than actual fortress. Dublin castle is still on use as a visitor attraction and also the place where the President of Ireland gives receptions to other heads of state.

Secondly, Dublin is known for its literature heritage so it merged another area to get more familiar with. Probably the most known is the book of the Kells (which I haven’t seen yet!) but it is only one of the many amazing things to see. Near Dublin castle is the Chester Beatty library that haves a collection of books, writings and texts. It was divided into two sections: First one is religious texts from all major religions in the world (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism)… and second part the art of the book revealing different features of books in different cultural areas (China Japan, Mesopotamia, Europe etc...) throughout their 

http://www.marshlibrary.ie/

history starting about 2000 years ago. Another library to visit was Marsh’s Library, the first public library founded in Dublin. It has remained almost exactly the same for past 300 years. For example Jonathan Swift, a famous writer of the Gulliver’s Travels used the library when writing the book.

Thirdly, I experienced some Irish culture... I had already been in Guinness Storehouse but the other important part of pub culture was still missing… Whiskey, the water of life as they call it in Ireland. The best place to learn about it is Jameson’s distillery that has been founded at year 1780. The tour itself took about an hour and lead through the process of making whiskey and at the end of tour a shot of Jameson to get the flavour of it. It was a good tour in the sense of learning about whiskey, but it would have been also interesting to hear about the Jameson’s brands own story and what has been part of it.

Now we have drinks, music, cultural history but one very important feature is still missing… Can anyone guess? It’s music. In Dublin there are so called “Irish nights” for tourist to get to know this part of culture. Three hours in a row including dinner, music and dancing was a really nice experience. Especially as the band told about stories of traditional music, instruments and rhythms that are part of Irish music. Besides music there were few world class professional dancers (being for example part of globally know lord of the dance show) who introduced audience into an Irish dance letting also them participate by learning some simple dance moves, luckily they didn’t pick me up on the stage :D

All in all I would definitely say that I have got much more out for myself than sitting in lectures… We’ll see then how the examinations go, but they are still around 1,5 weeks ahead so no need to stress about those (yet).