Guinness Storehouse

Posted on May 31, 2023 by admin

Summer-like days have arrived here in Illinois more-or-less on time, the last week of May. Temps pushing and then exceeding 30° C., as they would calculate it in the EU. Which I suspect would wilt the Irish.

Climates To Travel, re Ireland: “In Summer, from June to August, temperatures are cool: average highs are around 17/18° C. (63/64° F.) in the north, and around 19/20° C. (66/68° F.) in the rest of Ireland. The rains are also frequent in this season.”

Once upon a time, the population just lived with it. And maybe drank heavily, though far be it from me to peddle Irish stereotypes.

Now many Irish can afford sunny holidays around the Mediterranean. On the way to the airport to catch our flight to Barcelona, I told our cab driver – a fellow about my age – where we were headed, and he said he’d just been to somewhere on the Costa Brava for holidaymaking, though I didn’t catch the name of the place. (Indeed, from 2014 to 2019, the number of Irish taking trips to the rest of the EU and everywhere else ballooned, according to the Republic’s Central Statistics Office.)

I asked him whether he’d grown up in Dublin, and he said he had, and that the city wasn’t anything like it used to be.

“You know where O’Connell crosses the river?”

As it happened, I did. Busy place. Lots of traffic.

“There used to be two cops directing traffic there, one on each side. That was all there needed to be.”

Everywhere is different compared with 50 years ago. I seem to remember having a similar conversation with our driver about how much Mexico City had changed since the Olympics, and my own experience with San Antonio and Nashville on even shorter timelines is the same.

One of the last places we visited in Dublin, while our bags under the care of the front desk of the hotel we’d checked out a few hours earlier, was the Guinness Storehouse. It isn’t far west of central Dublin, and part of the Guinness brewery complex in St. James’s Gate, but not a brew facility any more.

The façade of the storehouse.

I prefer touring actual breweries and seeing their equipment, such as at the Carlsberg brewery in Copenhagen or the Yuengling brewery in Tampa. But Guinness is probably too popular for that, so the famed brewery created a museum within an old fermentation plant that had been originally developed in 1904 and, remarkably enough, was Ireland’s first steel-frame building, nearly 20 years after Chicago’s Home Insurance Building.

As a tourist facility, the storehouse opened in 2000, and an uncited stat at Wiki says 20 million people have visited since then. I believe it. The place was fairly crowded, with mostly Irish and American English audible, but some German too — the only place in Dublin where I heard much.

Looking up from the ground floor inside the storehouse.

Not, I have to add, the first floor, which is the second floor, and typically marked “1” on Irish elevator buttons, that is, lift buttons (“0” is the ground floor, “-1” the basement). It was the same in Barcelona.

You don’t take elevators up anyway. Going up via escalators to the next few floors, you see various facts on the wall.

Plus artifacts from the brewery’s history, such as a safe in which a supply of spare yeast used to be kept.

My favorite displays were of Guinness advertising over the years.

The famed zoo animals advertising the beer – which I didn’t realize were famed – were the creation of English artist John Gilroy (d. 1985).

“Guinness is Good for You” was a mid-century ad slogan. For years, I thought that was just something people said. I guess it was, encouraged by adverts. These days, however, that sort of claim, vague as it is, would seem to be banned by Irish advertising standards.

The tour ends on the top floor of the building, home of the Gravity Bar, which has some fine views of Dublin, making you realize what a low-rise place it is, for a metro area of about 2 million. That is due to regulation, which limits building height to a maximum between 16 meters and 28 meters – about what, eight or nine stories? The Gravity Bar is on the seventh floor; which would be the eighth floor.

The structure to the left is part of the actual production facility for Guinness.

Not sure what building that is under construction, but there were a fair number of cranes active in Dublin when we were there. That activity will probably slow down soon, since the European Central Bank has been raising interest rates, too.

The Gravity Bar is where you have your Guinness, which comes with the price of the tour. I don’t particularly care for it, but I drank it all. You can’t come to Ireland and not drink at least one. No doubt the marketing staff at Diageo, the London-based multinational that owns Guinness, would be happy to know that even a fairly beer-indifferent American feels that way.

Besides the traditional stout, the brewery offers other Guinness products, including a 0.0 stout, which Yuriko had. Not to trade on stereotypes or anything, but that doesn’t seem very Irish.

Dublin Castle

Posted on May 30, 2023 by admin

For someone who has been dead for over 800 years, even a monarch, King John of England is surprisingly well remembered. For signing Magna Carta, of course, but also losing most of France, trying to kill Errol Flynn, etc.

Another thing to remember about John: In the early 13th century, he ordered the building of a castle in Dublin to help consolidate Anglo-Norman rule, which it did. Over the centuries, via a convoluted and often violent path, the castle then buttressed English rule, then British rule, then famously the structure was turned over to the Irish Free State on January 16, 1922. These days, it houses various offices of the Republic of Ireland, including one whose antecedents were probably functioning from day one under King John.

To this day, the structure is called Dublin Castle, though it was mostly redeveloped into a Georgian palace after a major fire in the 17th century. Besides housing government offices, and rooms for state occasions, the Castle is a major tourist attraction.

We took a tour one afternoon. Our garrulous red-headed tour guide from County I-forget-which-but-not-Dublin had a lot to say, as you’d expect. We had a particularly interesting discussion about the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels from the Castle in 1907, a crime that has never been solved. I asked her if there had been any suspects, and she said yes, quite a few, including a ne’er-do-well brother of the explorer Ernest Shackleton.

The enclosure is expansive, and roughly the size it would have been in the early years.

Elements of the medieval castle do survive. Some stubs of its walls are now underground, which you climb down stairs to see, and two of the four original towers still stand above ground. One is the Record Tower, the crenellated structure in my image below that is currently closed and being restored as an additional tourist element.

Next to the Record Tower is the Chapel Royal, which was added in the 19th century as a private chapel for the Viceroy of Ireland and his family. That was open.

As befitting its era, it was built in the Gothic Revival style. There was a good deal more Gothic Revival in Ireland than I expected.

Next stop: the State Apartments. That is, the fancy rooms used for official functions. They are well trod, and not just with tourists.

“Over the centuries, those entertained at Dublin Castle have included Benjamin Franklin (1771), the Duke of Wellington (1807), Daniel O’Connell (1841), Queen Victoria (1849, 1853, 1861 & 1900), Charles Dickens (1864), Countess Markievicz (1905), Princess Grace of Monaco (1961), John F. Kennedy (1963), Charles de Gaulle (1969), Nelson Mandela (1990) and Queen Elizabeth II (2011),” says the castle web site.

The seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Republic, whose executions soon came to be seen not just as a crime, but a blunder, have a place of honor near the entrance.

The State Corridor, featuring portraits of the presidents of the Republic, none of whom I could say I’d heard of. Now I have.

The State Drawing Room.

Intriguing that officialdom of Republic has not, for the most part, scrubbed the Castle of reminders of Ireland’s past as part of the British Empire. There in the drawing room, for instance, is Queen Victoria, by John Partridge (1840).

Prince Albert, too (1841).

The Throne Room.

“[The Throne Room] was created in 1788 as an audience chamber in which the Viceroy received guests on behalf of the British monarch…” notes the castle. “The throne was made for the visit to Ireland of King George IV, in 1821. It was later used by Queen Victoria and King Edward VII during their visits to the Castle. The last monarch to use it before Irish independence was King George V, in 1911.”

The Portrait Gallery.

“This room takes its name from the collection of portraits of Irish Viceroys that have hung on its walls since 1849. The room’s main function was as a dining room where State dinners were held… The room continues to be used for State receptions by the Irish government today.”

Largest of all is St. Patrick’s Hall, where events for state visitors are held, and the presidents of the Republic are inaugurated. Ceiling by Italian artist Vincenzo Waldré, who made his living in England and Ireland.

Not too long ago, President Biden was the guest of honor at a banquet at St. Patrick’s Hall. I understand he was well received in Ireland, but not quite everyone was happy about his visit.

A leftover poster we spotted nowhere the Castle, but rather on a wall on an otherwise colorless street not far from the Guinness brewery.

Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin

Posted on May 29, 2023 by admin

During our visit to Ireland, we made the acquaintance of Strongbow.

That is, the tomb of Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, Lord of Leinster, Justiciar of Ireland, which can be found in the nave of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin.

Strongbow was an important figure in Irish history, being one of the first and certain most forceful of the Anglo-Normans to show up in the 12th century to take over the joint. Or most of it, anyway, which they no doubt saw as carrying on the profitable work of their predecessors who conquered Saxon England.

Except that the effigy and tomb aren’t actually his. As the cathedral itself notes: “In 1562, the nave roof vaulting collapsed and Strongbow’s tomb was smashed, the current tomb being a contemporary replacement from Drogheda. The cathedral was in ruins and emergency rebuilding took place immediately. This temporary solution lasted until the 1870s!”

Centuries pass, things get lost or kicked around. Strongbow didn’t found the cathedral – that was the work of the Viking Sitric Silkenbeard, he of another fine sobriquet, ca. 1028 – but the Anglo-Norman enlarged it into a stone structure.

We walked by Christ Church Cathedral our first day in town, after visiting St. Patrick’s. One major church per day is usually enough, so we didn’t come back until the next day. The cathedral took its current form in (no surprise) the 19th century, thus becoming another uncertain amalgam of Gothic and Gothic Revival, with Romanesque elements thrown in for grins.

The flooring is 19th century, though perhaps a recreation of earlier designs. Whatever the case, I liked it a lot.

Something unique to Christ Church for reasons I haven’t discerned, and maybe don’t quite need to know: Floor tiles showing foxes dressed as pilgrims, complete with hats, walking sticks and back packs.

The figures exist elsewhere, too, in what look to be newer iterations.

The cathedral has a sizable crypt, something St. Patrick’s doesn’t, presumably because of the water table, though the two aren’t that far apart.

A number of artifacts are on display, such as worn statues of Charles I and Charles II.

Also, the cathedral’s copy of Magna Carta, which isn’t a distinct document, but part of a lawyer’s handbook probably brought to the church ca. 1300 that contained copies of many important legal documents, including important English statues of the 13th century.

Christ Church Cathedral, formally the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, is curiously one of the Church of Ireland’s two cathedrals in Dublin. It isn’t entirely clear why the second one (St. Patrick’s) was built, but built it was, and eventually the church sorted things out by making Christ Church the cathedral of the Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough, while St. Patrick’s is the national cathedral.

To make things even more interesting, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin nominally claims Christ Church as his cathedral, though uses St. Mary’s, elsewhere in Dublin (we didn’t make it there) as his pro-cathedral.

Organized religion wouldn’t be nearly so interesting if it were more organized.

GPO, Dublin

Posted on May 28, 2023 by admin

The price of a postcard mailed from Ireland to the United States is €2.20, which is about $2.36 these days. Why the high cost? Couldn’t say. Even the USPS has that beat, charging $1.45 for a card from the U.S. to Ireland.

So while I bought a fair number of cards in Ireland, priced from €0.25 to €1 each, I only sent four at the elevated trans-Atlantic price, mostly to people who had previously sent me cards from Europe. I mailed all them at the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, not far north of the River Liffey.

The building dates back to 1818 and played more of a part in Irish history than most main post offices in most countries. I’m referring to the Easter Rising, of course, when the GPO was rebel HQ. As such, it took a thorough shelling.

In the basement is GPO Witness History, a museum about the Easter Rising, opened on the occasion of the centennial in 2016. I suspect that most modern Irish agree that 1916 was a shining moment for Irish nationalism, but maybe there’s less agreement on the course of things after that.

In any case, the museum covered the knotty convolutions of Irish politics at the turn of the 20th century, then the week of the uprising day by day (confusion for just about everyone), including a video dramatizing the bad-to-worse situation inside the GPO, with some of the characters touching on how their failure would pave the way for a free Ireland. That would be a rocky road, with the rest of the displays dealing with the immediate aftermath of the Rising and subsequent bloody fight for independence and the civil war.

I especially liked the re-creation of some of the posters to be found on the walls of Dublin more than 100 years ago. Some political.

Some not.

Once upon a time, Nelson’s Pillar stood very near the GPO in the middle of O’Connell Street, as seen in the post-Rising photo above, naturally honoring the victor of Trafalgar. The IRA (apparently) blew it up in 1966. Nothing was put on the site until 2003, when the city of had the Spire of Dublin erected.

Definitely not honoring anyone in particular, especially not an Englishman. Not likely to inspire political ire, but who knows. Pin-like structures rising almost 400 feet might offend people in some future century for reasons we can’t possibly imagine.

I Blame Harry Potter

Posted on May 27, 2023 by admin

The second day we were in Dublin, we made our way to Trinity College to see its star attractions: the Book of Kells and the Long Room, which you visit at the same time. I have no doubt that they were worth seeing, and I’m glad we saw them, though paying the steep €18.50 for Yuriko, €15 for me as a 60+, made me grumble.

The Long Room, which Trinity College calls the Old Library, is every bit as magnificent as its reputation – the vast rows of bookshelves, the soaring ceiling, the beauty of the wood, the great thinker busts lining the way.

Thinking on it later, I wondered: why the crowds? As magnificent as they can be, libraries aren’t generally known as tourist magnets. A fair number of people were in the British Library and the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress when I visited those places, to name some of the grandest libraries anywhere. But not the sort of crowds that requires timed tickets acquired ahead of time.

Could it be that people are coming to see the Book of Kells? That artifact certainly has a remarkable history and uncommon beauty.

“Visitor income from the Book of Kells last year [2019] totalled €12.7m, as more than one million visitors paid to view the ancient manuscript,” according to RTÉ.

That isn’t quite correct, since your ticket allows you to see the Book of Kells, and then the Long Room, for the same price. First you pass by exhibits detailing the book’s history, its artistry and other aspects, such as the truly remarkable way the monks who created it ca. AD 800 scrounged up raw materials for their inks and pigments. From there, you climb a small staircase to a small, dimly lit room, which includes one thing and one thing only, inside a clear cube: the Book of Kells.

Periodically curators turn the pages that are on display. I wish I’d made a note of what the book was open to when we saw it, but I didn’t. Somewhere in the Gospel of John, and not one of the more elaborate pages. On the whole, a drab presentation. I understand the need for conservation, and perhaps a dim setting, but book-in-box in a barren room isn’t quite the impressive experience a medieval manuscript could offer.

The cube is fairly new, I’ve read, holding the book only since 2020. Maybe it was in a less state-of-the-art cube before that, but I have to wonder how the book has been displayed over the years since the mid-19th century, when it first went on display, presumably as part of the Victorian enthusiasm for things medieval.

If I’d shown up in Dublin in 1983, where would it have been – in a case in the Long Room itself? — and how much would I have paid, if anything?

Moot point, since Ireland was never under consideration on that trip, mostly because we were headed toward the Continent, and none of us had any special connection to the country. Still, if I only had my copy of Let’s Go Europe 1983, I might be able to answer that question.

I asked Yuriko after we visited whether she’d heard of the Book of Kells beforehand. Yes, she said, but she added that the Long Room was more famous.

Why?

Harry Potter, she said.

What?

It’s like the library in the movies, she answered.

A little checking confirmed that the Hogwart’s Library scenes in movies weren’t filmed at the Long Room, but rather the similarly long and dark-wooded Duke Humfrey’s Library at Oxford, part of the Bodleian Library. Even so, I’ve found references to people noting the similarities between the fictional library and the real one in Dublin, and that’s enough for me to speculate that the Harry Potter movies kicked the Long Room up a few notches in the tourist imagination, allowing Trinity College to jack up their prices as demand grew.

So as I see it, J.K. Rowling owes us some money. Maybe not the entire admission, but the difference between what we would have paid 20 years ago and now.

Not that I’m against conservation of the Long Room, which takes money. Still, I’m also against gouging tourists simply because your sight has (sort of) been featured in some blockbuster entertainment. How is it that St. Patrick’s costs only €8 and Barcelona Cathedral (examples still fresh in mind) costs €9, with maintenance budgets that have to be comparable?

Speaking of conservation, a multi-million euro conservation project is underway at the Long Room, and most of the books are now elsewhere. Note the empty shelves.

The busts are still there.

All of them depict men. As I understand it, the renovation will add four great women thinkers to their ranks, though I don’t know whether that means displacing anyone who’s run afoul of present-day sensibilities.

The renovation will also mean that the Long Room is closing later this year for a few years, so I suppose we were lucky to get a look.

After we emerged from the Long Room – from the gift shop, actually – we took a look around campus and some of its handsome buildings.

A campus that does not, like so many in America, follow the physical pattern of the University of Virginia, mainly since it’s some centuries older. I was interested the learn that the full name of Trinity College is The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin.

Irish Greens

Posted on May 26, 2023 by admin

Our hotel in Dublin was on a street of Georgian townhouses, and as far as I could tell it was created from an amalgam of at least two such structures. One of the city’s two tram lines runs down the street, with a stop a two-minute walk away from where we stayed.

St. Stephen’s Green was about five minutes away on foot in the other direction. Often enough we’d forgo part of the tram ride for a stroll through the greens of the park on cool and bright May mornings.

“This nine hectare/22-acre park, in Dublin City Centre, has been maintained in the original Victorian layout with 750 trees, extensive shrub planting with spring and summer Victorian flower bedding,” says Visit Dublin.

A Victorian-era creation. Of course. The site had been open land long before that, such as a marshy commons for centuries, then essentially a private green as its perimeter developed. In the 1870s, Baron Ardilaun acquired the land and donated it to the Dublin Corporation (the city). I had to look him up and the baron turned out to be – yet another Guinness, Arthur Edward, son of the renovator of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Another good use for beer money.

Part of the landscaping includes water features.

History wasn’t done with St. Stephen’s Green after it became a city park. In 1916, the green figured in the Easter Rising.

“The rebels dug trenches, probably at the four entranceways and other places – the written sources aren’t very specific about where they were,” University of Bristol reader in archaeology Joanna Brück told Irish Central.

“There has been debate over whether it was a strategically good location to take over or not,” she said, but in any case their presence at the green wasn’t any more successful than anywhere else that week for the rebels.

Decimus Burton

Toward the end of our visit, we made our way to another Dublin greenspace, one much larger (707 hectares/1,750 acres) in the western reaches of the city: Phoenix Park.

Though as a distinct tract of land, the park has a long history – site of an abbey that Henry VIII squelched, a royal hunting park – it took its modern form during the Victorian era (I’m sensing a pattern here). None other than Decimus Burton gave the park its current form.

I’d call him the Frederick Law Olmstead of the British Isles for his many parks, but actually Burton was a little earlier, and designed many structures as well. Still, as landscape designers, they’re clearly in the same league.

That afternoon also happened to be the warmest one during our visit, which added to the pleasure of the walk. We didn’t get that far, considering how large Phoenix Park is, but we made it to the gazebo near the zoo. An Irish gazebo, which are distinctive since independence for not having sides. Go ahead, look it up.

A picturesque water feature, with trees and bushes and birds to go with.

A scattering of memorials, such as that of Seán Heuston.

I didn’t know who he was, though I noticed that his name is attached to a nearby tram stop as well. I figured he died for independence. Yes, indeed. Led men in 1916 and met his end at Kilmainham Gaol not long after.

Not far away from Heuston is an example of de-memorialization.

The plinth remains, surrounded by trees that were obviously planted for the purpose of obscuring the site. There is still carving on the plinth, however, which is only partly readable, but I figured it out. Once upon a time (1870-1956), a statue of George William Frederick Howard, 7th Earl of Carlisle, stood there. He was Palmerston’s Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for a couple of stints in the mid-19th century, and his statue wasn’t a relic of the Victorian era that at least some Irish cared to keep. It was bombed.

The obelisk honoring Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, on the other hand, still stands tall in Phoenix Park, despite him being born into the Protestant Ascendancy.

After all, Wellington was a Dubliner who gave Napoleon his final bum’s rush from the world stage, and supported Catholic Emancipation besides.

The bronze used for the plaques, on all four sides, is from cannons captured at Waterloo.

One reason I wanted to visit Phoenix Park was that I’ve known about it for so long, since ca. 1980. One day at the Vanderbilt Library, I discovered a microfilm collection of decades of The Times of London, which maybe went all the way back to the paper’s founding in the 1780s. Flipping through it more-or-less at random provided a fascinating pastime for me, because that’s the kind of interest in history I have (not a disciplined one of a scholar).

Completely by chance I came across a flood of column inches for days and days in the spring of 1882 about what would be called the Phoenix Park Murders. I had to look up the location of Phoenix Park, and more about the murders, and never forgot.

Our afternoon walk in the park was long, interspersed with rests on benches, of which there are too few, and sometimes by reclining on the ground. Such as on this daisy-covered slope.

Better, it occurred me on that sunny day in Ireland, to be pushing down the daisies than pushing them up.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin

Posted on May 25, 2023 by admin

In America, we have Gothic Revival churches, no more than 150 years old if that. In Europe, there are actual Gothic churches, and stepping inside takes you into sacred space many centuries older. You count as distant, unimaginable posterity for the builders or rebuilders of a place like St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

The cathedral was the first place we went in that city. Actually, no. We ate at a spot called Wowburger first, partly because it was one of the few places open late morning on a Sunday. Though clearly inspired by American hamburgers and only around since 2015, I’d argue that Dublin-originated Wowburger is just as Irish as the cathedral. Go back far enough, after all, and cathedrals aren’t native to Ireland, either. Neither were the Anglo-Normans who built St. Patrick’s in the 13th century.

Wowburgers were really good. No wonder the chain is expanding beyond Ireland.

I used Google Maps, but we could also hear the ringing of its bells to guide us to the cathedral.

Adjoining the cathedral is a St. Patrick’s Park, created at the dawn of the 20th century. Nice place for a short stroll ahead of entering the cathedral.

Services had just ended, so St. Patrick’s opened to tourists. A good many besides us were there.

Much of the current interior appearance of the cathedral has a Victorian look, following a major 19th-century restoration and renovation funded – and directed – by Benjamin Guinness, a grandson of Arthur Guinness, and non-architect. Beer money to revive sacred space. Standards of documentation were a bit lax in the 1860s, so it isn’t entirely clear now what is renovation and what is older. So in a real sense, St. Patrick’s is both Gothic and Gothic Revival.

Because I am ignorant about much, I assumed going in that St. Patrick’s, a major religious edifice in the heart of Ireland, was Roman Catholic. But no: it is part of the Church of Ireland, a member of the Anglican Communion. That fact made me a little more amenable to paying the admission of €8 (the 60+ senior rate), not because of its Anglicanism specifically, but because there are so few members of that denomination to support such a grand church. The Guinness family can’t presumably be counted on to maintain the place in our time.

That discovery made me wonder: just how Catholic is Ireland these days? Not as much as I’d have thought, just like Mexico. According to the latest census (2016) by the Republic of Ireland, 78.3% of the population nationwide claims membership, down from about 95% the year I was born. The Church of Ireland counts 2.8% of the population as members these days. Those Irish claiming no religion came in at just short of 10%, way up from next to none during my lifetime.

Food for thought among these ancient stones and glass.

Another fascination for me of churches of this age are the burials and memorials, mostly of people mostly forgotten. St. Patrick’s has many. I looked for Jonathan Swift, among other things dean of the cathedral for many years, and who is not forgotten, but I didn’t take a good picture of his stone on the floor.

One Capt. John Boyd, on the other hand, commander of the HMS Ajax and lost in a storm off Dublin in 1861, has a life-sized statue right at the entrance. No one else was paying him any mind.

Poignant reminders of those lost in the Great War.

Is there anything to remind us of St. Patrick himself in his namesake cathedral? At least one thing I saw, which is found in the gift shop in the back of the cathedral.

St. Patrick socks. Wear them to keep snakes away? Could be.

An Hiberno-Iberian Trans-Atlantic Jaunt

Posted on May 24, 2023 by admin

If, on the day that I graduated from college in 1983, a djinn with certain knowledge of the future had appeared to me and said, Forty years to the day from today — May 13, 2023 — you will board a jet airliner and fly to Ireland, my response might well have been, Really? Cool. Where else do I go over the next 40 years?

But he would be gone in a flash, as that is how djinn seem to disappear, before he imparted any other information about the one score and ten other countries between those two days. Just as well that djinn are not known to appear to Americans of our time. Not me, anyway. I just had to let the four decades unfold.

This not-very-important coincidence of May 13ths exactly 40 years apart occurred to me a few days before Yuriko and I took an Aer Lingus flight up and over eastern Canada, just south of Greenland’s southern tip, and on to Dublin the next morning, May 14.

Ireland was our place to recover from jet lag, but that didn’t keep us from treading (and tram riding) the streets of the Irish capital until May 17, and looking at as much as possible.

The evening of the 17th we flew to Barcelona for the second and longer leg of the trip. Except for an excursion to Montserrat for a day, we stayed in that city of 21st-century renown, a place for sensation overload of all kinds and highly recommended by friends with passports and travel inclinations. We returned home yesterday via a flight back to Dublin for a layover, and then another to Chicago.

Wake up in Catalonia, go to bed in Illinois. Too ordinary to be regarded as the marvel it is.

New cities for us; new countries. We liked Dublin. We really liked Barcelona. I expected it would break that way.

This month’s jaunt was our first visit to Europe since before smartphones, the wide use of the Internet or email or texting or QR codes, Google maps, or the euro. I’m not sure whether all that has made overseas travels any easier.

Regardless, we kept up an active pace of quick-step tourism, something like our passage through Arizona and Utah last year, except that walking and driving through wide open spaces seeking natural splendor became walking and public transit through the urban corridors of central Dublin and Barcelona, seeking human-made marvels.

We found some. Centuries-old churches, ornate palaces, imaginative modern buildings, sites of historic violence, plazas thick with people at play or merely rest, depositories of famed art and books, vistas of the ocean and among mountains, and Euro-designed urban greenspaces a bit different from what we’re used to in North America.

We passed over brick, cobblestone and asphalt, down sidewalks narrow and wide, up and down stairs, in the footsteps of centuries of people, mostly unknown and unknowable except in the broadest strokes, who walked these exact spots in times hard or prosperous. The early 21st century, as it happens, is a prosperous era in both cities. Shops are many and various and full and busy.

Concentrated prosperity. For an American used to dispersed prosperity, this is a novelty.

Temps in Dublin tended to be lower than in Barcelona, though only a few degrees. By mid-day most days, the sun shined and it was 20 degrees C. or a few more, as they reckon things. The spring air had the happy effect of encouraging bare midriffs among young Irish and Catalan women both. We were rained on only twice, briefly, and only on one day in Spain did we feel anything like high heat.

The more a meal featured some regional product, say milk and cheese in Ireland or seafood in Spain, the better it tended to be. The restaurants we visited were usually linear rooms with expansive menus, or simple takeout joints, or we sought food at convenience stores or actual grocery stores. I confirmed that, if I were a drinking man, Guinness wouldn’t be for me, but sangria would be.

We passed through endless seas of faces along the sidewalks and jammed in the subway cars and trams, maybe not quite as various as in New York or Chicago, but of great variety all the same. We encountered signs in English that were readable but not always quite comprehensible. Others in Catalan were either easy, or matters of guesswork. We noticed the way ordinary bits of a city’s infrastructure look just a little different in another country, or sometimes a lot different. We saw graffiti on the walls and graffiti on skin.

What is graffiti in Spanish? I had to look that up. El graffiti, turns out. Despite the presence of surveillance cameras in countless street-facing nooks, graffiti artists are not deterred in Barcelona, or Dublin either, from casting their paint on walls, doors, railyard surfaces and occasionally (the wankers) useful signs. Still, you have to be amused sometimes.

Do they know Andy Capp in Barcelona? Someone does.

(Former) Dead Man’s Curve

Posted on May 11, 2023 by admin

Time for a genuine spring break, now that genuine spring has arrived. Back to posted content around May 24.

Returning from Normal on Sunday, I took another short detour fairly close by, in the wonderfully named town of Towanda, pop. 430 or so, originally a central Illinois project of the busy 19th-century businessman Jesse Fell. I’d seen signs for Towanda on the Interstate for years, but never stopped.

Towanda is the home of a massive grain elevator, owned by Evergreen FS of Bloomington.

For a more ordinary tourist, a stretch of the former U.S. 66 passes through town, and has a walking path next to the road. I took a stroll.

Also part of the former highway: Dead Man’s Curve.

The nickname isn’t too hard to figure out, but a sign offers details.

It doesn’t offer a death toll, which may not be known, but does say that from 1927 until a bypass was built in 1954, the curve was the site of “many disastrous accidents,” especially involving drivers from Chicago, “unfamiliar with the road and accustomed to higher speeds.” Oops. Once a hazard, now a minor tourist attraction.

Note the Burma Shave signs. They look fairly new, so I take them to be modern homages, in this case noting the dangers of Dead Man’s Curve.

There’s a rhyme for each direction of travel on the road.

Northbound: Car In Ditch/Driver In Tree/The Moon Was Full/And So Was He/Burma Shave.

Southbound: Around The Curve/Lickety-Split/Beautiful Car/Wasn’t It?/Burma Shave.

South Side Cemetery, Pontiac, Illinois

Posted on May 10, 2023 by admin

Across the Vermilion River from Chautauqua Park in Pontiac, Illinois, is South Side Cemetery, which predates the town’s Chautauqua activity by some decades, since its first burials were in 1856. At 24 acres, it’s still an active municipal burial ground. I saw at least two memorials with death dates in 2023.

Overall, a nice place for a stroll on a warm day in May, if you don’t mind being in a cemetery. I can’t say I ever have been.

Some older stones, including a scattering of Civil War veterans.

As usual with small towns, not many mausoleums or large monuments, but there are a few.

Lemuel G. Cairns fought for the Union, too, but has no ordinary soldier’s stone. According to Find a Grave, he achieved the rank of sergeant and after the war dealt in cattle in Texas, before moving to Illinois. I suspect he did well in that business in Texas, but maybe got tired of the heat.

The only sizable mausoleum I spotted.

A number of Gaylords reside there, including this fellow, it seems, a doctor and Union veteran.

This is a surname you don’t see much: Hercules. Also, an unusual design for a stone.

Rare, but not unknown.

“Early examples of the surname recording taken from surviving church registers include those of William Hercules (also recorded as Herculus) at the church of St Margaret’s Westminster, on January 16th 1603, and in the Shetlands, William Herculason who married Christian Harryson at Delting, on January 24th 1752,” says the Internet Surname Database.

A prominent Pontiac family, no doubt. With a name like that, they’d better be. One of them – J.W. Hercules – is mentioned as the designer of the Pontiac Chautauqua pavilion.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Monthly Archives: May 2023