Week 3 Monday through Wednesday

Monday a group of us traveled into City Centre and visited some great bars and listened to music in the Temple Bar district. At about 9 PM we when to a comedy club in the basement of a pub to see free shows. The students I am with are very into “free”, where I am always of the belief that you get what you pay for, so I did not expect much.

Well I could not have been more wrong. There were 4 comedians and they each gave about a 20 minute show. All of them were very funny! The one guy singled me out as a likely Trump voter (age profiling?). I don’t remember most of the stuff he directed at me other than it was funny, except at one point he said “you know you even look like Trump with that hair”. My eyes were watering to the point that I could not see, it was hilarious!

Tuesday as part of our ‘cultural experience’ the class went to the Museum of Art in Dublin in the afternoon. They have several painting by Rembrandt and Michelangelo in their permanent collection so that I liked. Here comes the bad part, the museum is having a special showing of DaVinci sketches that are on loan from a London museum, in fact they devoted an entire wing to it! There are 10 of them and they are 12”x 18” black ink drawings of a leg or a head or something else that he used to prepare for a painting. I don’t get it so I concluded I don’t have any culture. Jackie has drawings posted on our refrigerator that that grandkids did and DaVinci’s stuff looked no more interesting than that refrigerator art!  

Wednesday after class 13 of us chartered a small bus to travel 50 minutes from Dublin to County Meath and visit a very special place, Newgrange, the largest of many Neolithic era passage tombs in the area. Newgrange is something special with stone walls topped by a grass dome. It was built around 3200 BC so it is 600 years older than the pyramids of Egypt! This is a UNESCO site and actual entrance to the passage tomb is limited to 600 people per day but our bus driver went to Newgrange early in the morning to get tickets for us. You enter and walk crouched over about 20 yards through a narrow entrance passage to the main chamber. The main chamber has three little rooms off to the side with large stone basins that held the cremated bones of the dead. Newgrange was built with such precision that when the sun rises on the both the summer and winter solstice a bright beam of light enters the main chamber. They darkened the chamber while we were in there (it was as dark an environment as I have ever been in) and used a bright light shinned into the portal to simulate the event and it was pretty spectacular. One more thing, the drainage system the builders installed was so good that not a drop of water has penetrated to the main chamber in 40 centuries.

As I write this it is a little after lunch on Wednesday. Plans for today include a visit to the infamous Kilmainham jail where the leaders of the 1916 Rising were court marshalled and executed by the British. In a particularly brutal move Connelly, who was wounded, was taken off his stretcher and tied to a chair so he could face the firing squad. The only leader not executed was Eamon de Valera and that was because he was born in America and the British did not want to deal with any American backlash. De Valera went on to become the President of the Republic for decades after freedom was achieved.

Tomorrow we leave for Barcelona about 6:30 AM so this will be an early night to bed. Looking forward to Barcelona and I understand it will be a lot of fun. I am not taking my laptop so the next blog will come Sunday night or Monday.

Irish Language Lesson:

Schemes = plans/projects

Rough sleeper = homeless person

Drink driving = DUI

Pictures: Temple Bar; Comedy Club; Irish countryside from Newgrange; Newgrange