My experiences in Ireland so far have come to revolve around two major themes: Battling the great Irish bandwidth famineThis famine is at least partly responsible for the recent dearth of posts, though it appears to be nearly at an end; more about this in a coming post., and discovering the inverse relationship between cost and worth in Ireland.

Felix and Michelle bore the brunt of this latter realization when they visited for a week. It was with them that I witnessed the more galling aspects of the Irish tourism industry. We paid 7 euros each for a tour of the old Jameson distillery, for which we were shown a video that involved a lot of Irish water, then shown around an indoor whiskey themepark by Jenny, a Quebecois student guide whose cheery delivery could not quite mask her disdain for us.

We paid 7.50 euro each for a gander at the Book of Kells at Tritinity College Library. At that price, you get a MoMa’s worth of art elsewhere. Here, you get to navigate a multimedia warren of fun facts about monks before you are let into a dark room which may or may not be showing you a page of the book in question — it could very well have been the curator’s copy of Dubliners.

In the Oscar Wilde family home, a tour costs exactly 2.54 euros. For that price, we were herded into the study, where we were subject to a cruel and unusual video seemingly edited by Lenny from Memento. After multiple pans of every conceivable object in the house, including the tastfully appointed carpark, there was absolutely no need to actually see the house.

By the end of their stay, we got an inkling that perhaps we should avoid paying exhibits. After a long walk along the cliffs above St. Kevin‘s cell at Glendalough, we visited the remarkable monastic village, at no charge. But it was after Felix and Michelle left that I found the cultural gems in Dublin, and they were all free.

The Chester Beatty Library is an ideal museum. Focused, well-curated, bite-sized, and with some serious money thrown at it. It contains a massive collection of books and manuscripts bequeathed by an Irish-American millionaire, which the curators use to illustrate the history of writing, illustration and printing. It’s fitting that the museum should be in Ireland; it echoes the role Irish monks performed when they collected and preserved ancient texts.

Then there is the modern wing of the National Gallery of Ireland, an annex with Mondrian-inspired architecture (well, OK, minus the colors &mdash monochrome Mondrian) that houses the remarkably fresh and new-to-me work of contemporary Irish painters. By now, I have become sufficiently leery of paying for exhibits that when I was offered the opportunity to pay 10 euros for a special exhibit by a Swiss painter that sounded as inspiring as, well, Swiss art, I avoided it. I don’t regret it yet.