Past its prime... but Ireland

So, long story short, I created this post on my laptop when we were in Ireland, but we didn't take my laptop with us to Eastern Europe, so I couldn't post this until now. Sorry for the lateness, but I thought you still might enjoy it. We will, hopefully sooner than later, update the rest of our own blog about the rest of our journey. We are in Cambridge now and moved into our place. I'll do another post about our new apartment later on.

This one’s for you Dad...

Dublin has a few favorite characters and they mention them a lot around town. One of them is James Joyce. He based most of his books in Ireland (he was also Irish). As I recall, Dad’s favorite book from college is A Portrait of a Young Man, which gives details of Joyce’s life. I tried to make it to one of the many historical sites they have about him, but all I ‘made’ time for was this statue. ;)

**Oddly enough, one of the last places we visited in our travels was Trieste, Italy. James Joyce wrote the bulk of Ulysses while living there and Ernest Hemingway got his idea for A Farewell to Arms in the hills around the town.

This one’s for the musicians in the family…

Dublin has many churches and we made it to three of them. St. Patrick’s Cathedral is reportedly on the site near where, in the 5th century, Saint Patrick baptized the Irish into Christianity. It is the largest church in Ireland and is well known for a few things including the site of the first playing of Handel’s Messiah. Although a combined choir of St. Patrick’s and Christ Church (another famous Cathedral) actually sang the Messiah outside on the streets, Handel played it on this church organ. Another fact, St. Patrick’s Cathedral’s most famous dean was Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels.