{"id":235,"date":"2003-07-24T13:53:44","date_gmt":"2003-07-24T20:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=235"},"modified":"2003-07-24T13:53:44","modified_gmt":"2003-07-24T20:53:44","slug":"travelog-ireland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2003\/07\/travelog-ireland\/","title":{"rendered":"Travelog: Ireland"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/span>, and discovering the inverse relationship between cost and worth in Ireland.<\/p>\n

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<\/span>, 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.<\/p>\n

We paid 7.50 euro each for a gander at the Book of Kells<\/span> at Tritinity College Library<\/a>. 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 \u2014 it could very well have been the curator’s copy of Dubliners<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the Oscar Wilde family home<\/span>, a tour<\/a> 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>‘s cell at Glendalough<\/span>, 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.<\/p>\n

The Chester Beatty Library<\/span> is an ideal museum. Focused, well-curated, bite-sized, and with some serious money thrown at it. It contains a massive collection<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Then there is the modern wing<\/span> of the National Gallery of Ireland<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-3N","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}