Day Seventy-Five - 24/11/2012 - Bog of Allen

     Three months ago in a cramped La Jolla office overlooking the Pacific Ocean, I promised a certain Dr. Alan that I would visit the Bog of Allen, which he only knew of from the ending of Joyce's short story, The Dead.  (I read that story, and saw the house where his aunts lived, but I can't say I experienced the elite class of Dublin.)  Today was the day that I would make the trip out to the Bog.
   The Bog of Allen is actually quite large, encompassing over 1% of all the land in Ireland, located fairly close to the center of Ireland.  Its peat is harvested in some areas, but people are making efforts to preserve other sections of the bog.  Apparently, samples from the bog can shed light on precipitation patterns in prehistoric times, helping us understand how climate change may influence the world today and in time to come.  The bog is able to preserve things like wooden structure, and indeed, various tracks have been found, thought to have been used in the medieval period to transport people and goods across the bog.
     Despite its size, getting to the bog was some sort of ordeal.  Very few people live around the bog, and nobody builds houses on the bog.  The closest town is Allenwood, which was our destination.  We caught a very early morning bus from Busáras, the Dublin main bus station with a return ticket to Allenwood.  The bus ride itself was rather time consuming, taking about two hours, during which most of the other inhabitants of the bus asked what two college aged kids were doing all the way out there.
     When we finally arrived at Allenwood, I had to ask the bus driver to make sure this was the right stop.  Allenwood was an intersection.  Literally, an intersection with buildings on four sides of the road.  There was a petrol station, a grocery, a pub, and, of course, a Chinese restaurant.  After asking the petrol station, the grocery station, and finally, the pub for the number for a taxi company, I acquired the numbers of both taxis operating in Allenwood.  Both, as in the only two.  The first lad was busy, and the second offered to take us up to the bog, with his own little driving tour included (all for a flat rate!).
     According to our personal tour guide, the bog has been home to all kind of treasures.  There are of course, the infamous bog people, very well preserved by the unique conditions in the bog.  Some have found various trinkets like jewelry in the bog.  Nowadays, people will sometimes drive through the bog looking for black wood, petrified wood from many years ago, that can sell for a fairly decent price.  Today, some use the bog as a natural refrigerator of sorts, butter being a common find when digging at random.
     My favorite part of the trip was the peat-burning stove in the pub we took refuge from the rain in.  The smell reminded me of Scotland.
     All said and done, I don't think that the trek to the bog was worth the time or money it took to get there, but I can now say that I have visited it.

Day Seventy-Four - 23/11/2012 - Dublin

     Today was off to a less than brilliant start.  After missing a 0300 bus to Dublin by about twenty seconds, we finally caught the next one, and made it to the city just in time to watch the sun rise.  From here it was another bus ride to the Belgian embassy for Meng's visa application.  Due to some very confusing (and partially mistranslated) instructions, Meng was denied her visa application and told to reapply in the country in which she was planning to stay the longest, which was Germany.  Of course, an appointment had to be made for the German embassy, which would take at least a week, and then it was doubtful if the visa would have time to approved at all.  Needless to say, this made for a rather dampened morning.
     On the bus back to Trinity College in the city centre, I ringed Butler's Chocolate as they give tours of the chocolate making facility, but alas, they had filled every spot for tours that day.  Determined not to let a sunny (but ironically still freezing) day go to waste, I pulled my last trick out of my sleeve: the Cake Cafe.
     Guided only by a rudimentary map I had downloaded from the internet and Meng's partially active location services, and the rather helpful signage in the city of Dublin, we departed the bus at what appeared to be St. Stephen's Green.  Keeping with the flavour of the day, this park proved to be Merrion Park, just north of St. Stephen's Green.  We wandered the streets, making it to the aforementioned green, and taking a nice morning stroll through it's swan-filled sidewalks.  From St. Stephen's, we walked down Harcourt street, lined with houses and shops, and then took a side alley named Camden Place to cut across to Pleasants Place, where the cafe was located.  Pleasants Place did not live up to its name, and I was beginning to think this was a very bad decision.  Thankfully, I quickly located the sign for the cafe, which appeared to be broken, and walked up to what appeared to be an abandoned industrial park.
     With great relief, I walked through the gate to find myself in a tranquil tree-lined patio, hosting tables and chairs and the cafe's menu.  Meng and I elected to dine inside due to the temperature, and we got seated at a nice, but very cozy table in the small cafe.  We both tried different types of teas and cakes and made a lovely time of the rather bleak morning.  A bit of trivia about the Cake Cafe: their toilets run  on rainwater which they collect, which can lead to the (sometimes alarming) brown appearance of their pre-flushed toilets.  All in all the cafe was a paradise just off of a dingy Dublin alley.
     With plenty of light left to escort our passage back to Harcourt street, we walked in the general direction of Dublin castle.  As we passed Temple Bar, we passed a huge Dunnes, adorned with a larger-than-life poster of Carolyn Donnelly, a designer.  Both Meng and I saw a woman of remarkably similar appearance (and hair) enter the store, dwarfed by her hanging portrait, as we walked past.
     We finally made it to Dublin Castle, and explored the area surrounding it.  Sadly the estate rooms were closed to the public as there was a meeting of EU officials regarding the upcoming Presidency of Ireland within the European Union.  To compensate, they were offering free tours of the medieval undercroft, which I availed of.  There is an original wall from the Powder Tower under the standing castle today that is considered to have been built in 1100.  The fact that any part of the Powder Tower remains is impressive in itself, when you consider that it was the storehouse for gunpowder.  A few metres away and below the Powder Tower was a sealed arch that formed part of the medieval moat.  It was sealed during the time of plague, in order to keep people from trying to gain access to the castle through the moat's drains.
     The tour then exited the undercroft and brought us back to the surface, where we traversed the courtyard.  Famous writer Jonathan Swift was born behind the church in Dublin Castle, and later was evicted after he accidentally burned down his room by candlelight.  A statue of Justice stands watching over the large courtyard.  When it was put in place by the British, it had no blindfold, and it faced the castle.  In the words of one Dubliner, Justice favored the castle, and showed her arse to the nation.  During the Easter Rising, troops led by Countess Markievicz marched up to Dublin Castle only to be met with closed gates.  A British soldier fired upon the troops from above, killing one rebel and igniting the hostilities in Dublin.  After Dublin eventually came under control of the rebels, Michael Collins, another influential leader of the Easter Rising, noticed that Justice's scales tended to favor the right as they filled up with rainwater.  He remedied this by drilling small drainage holes in each scale.  The curator ended the tour by mentioning that Dublin Castle was the home of the Irish Crown Jewels, and to please keep an eye out for them.  They went missing in 1907 and nobody has seen them since.
     After the tour of the castle, Meng and I stopped at a rather dodgy pizza joint, but luckily did not get sick.  We met up with Kevin, a UC student studying at University College Dublin, who was generously allowing us to stay in his apartment with some other students from the UC system.  That night we went out with Kevin's UCD friends to an Hacienda Pub with a Spanish Flair.  The walk to the pub brought us through the streets of Dublin now decorated with wreaths and lights.  A couple of turns and sidestreets later we wound up at an inconspicuous door near the Leprechaun museum.  This pub looked very closed, but the fearless Norwegian leader of our group raised her hand confidently and knocked on the minuscule door.  We waited with bated breath in the cold dark street, until the sounds of a latch opening were heard.  This experience still stands as the strangest pub adventure of the entire trip.  We entered the cramped chamber which was decorated in some strange mixture between a homey country cottage and a Spanish restaurant.  Our group of maybe 15 students occupied three of the five tables in the place, and promptly ordered drinks.  The bar was outfitted with a gigantic TV that showed something that may have been a scene from Paranormal Activity.  A grainy, black and white image that appeared mostly static caused me much intrigue as I stood looking at it cockeyed.  It wasn't until Kevin came up and noticed the street sign that I realized it was live footage of a security camera that was filming the entrance to the establishment.  Chilling.
     We spent the rest of the night getting better acquainted with Kevin and his friends, who I later learned were all from the International Club, which explained the diversity.  Despite the bitter cold, Dublin was proving to be a hospitable place.

Day Seventy-Three - 22/11/2012 - Cork

     Alex's friend Saachi, had come to visit Ireland for a few days.  Alex, always the gentleman, invited us along to a night tour of the Cork City Gaol, in fact the last one of the year.  So, we met at the Gaol, Meng and I having crossed the Shakey Bridge after our computer science class.  We arrived in the dark courtyard in rain, seemingly appropriate for the occasion.  The tour began with a overview of the Gaol's history, and its place in Cork's development.  It served as a Victorian jail in the 1800s, around the same time the Queen became known as the "Famine Queen".  In 1849, many Young Irelanders, members of the middle class cultural rebellion against the British, were imprisoned in Cork city Gaol.
     The tour started in the governor's room, the administrative head of the prison.  This was run by Barry Murphy, of Murphy family fame, after the famine.  This was significant in that Murphy was a Catholic, in a time when Catholics were not given respectable jobs or positions of power.  His service as governor is a reflection of the status that the Murphy family enjoyed in Cork.
     As we walked through the halls of the Gaol, the tour guide mentioned stories of inmates as young as 7 years old.  One Mary McDonald, aged 23 with 7 children, was imprisoned for prostitution which she took up to feed her children.  Many prisoners at the time came from the workhouses, the public relief programs funded by the government, that often offered worse conditions and less food than the prisons, leading to much intentional crime with the goal of being imprisoned.  It got to be such a popular option that the goal, like others across Ireland, had 7 to 8 people crammed into tiny cells.
     We came to the main elliptical room of the prison, with a metal staircase in the centre providing access to three tiers of cells.  The acoustics in this chamber are particularly good, with an original purpose of causing sounds, especially speech, to be heard from any part of the room.  (Today it is used to host concerts.)  Legal and psychological opinion of the time was that any amount of talking or interaction was detrimental to the reformation of the prisoner.  Guards used the acoustics to their advantage, pinpointing the source of the sound and reprimanding the prisoner's responsible.  The guards even took to tying pieces of felt to the bottoms of their shoes to mute their footsteps, allowing them to sneak up on prisoners.
     We walked up the central staircase to the second level, our footsteps clanging and echoing through the halls.  There was a long narrow hallway that had fallen pitch-black from the night.  At the end of the hallway a ghostly figured presented itself.  The guide had just finished telling the story of the spectre, ruined to be a nameless prisoner.  Helen Barrett, a ghost-hunter from Cobh, apparently came to investigate the phenomenon.  Although she was unable to contact the ghost, she could not deny its presence.  The current iteration of the phantom is admittedly a fraud, set up by a system of mirrors and smoke, but as recently as last year, some night guards reported hearing footsteps in the abandoned hallways.
     The tour continued to a large circular room outside of the main gaol complex, which served as a chapel in times gone by.  The tour now puts on a multimedia presentation in the room, with multiple projectors and a movie playing.  The movie tells the story of some of the notable prisoners, and their crimes.  Much of the history is related by a judge, who explains one of the oddities of British trials.  If a judge appears before a hearing with a piece of black silk in his wig, that means the judge has decided to institute the death penalty for the defendant, usually leading to some shock when the judge appears from his chambers.  The presentation also explained how the goal used to be a county jail located on what is now UCC campus.  In fact, the old UCC gates, the ones I walked through three times a week to go to class, were the original county jail gates.  This put something of a perspective on my morning walk.
     All in all the tour was very interesting, walking through the history of Cork City and its inhabitants.  It brought to life much of what we had learned in class.

Day Seventy-Two - 21/11/2012 - Cork

     The local off license lined its shelves with a rare treasure today.  Bottles of stout from the Franciscan Well, aged in Jameson casks to impart a bit of whisky flavour to an already well-balanced stout from the best microbrew in Cork.  This limited release included 800 bottles (incorrectly labeled with 900), and according to the proprietor of said off license, will sell out within the week.  The particular bottle pictured was enjoyed by all at our Thanksgiving celebration with Alex and Alex's friend Saachi (visiting from Berkeley) at Victoria Lodge, the UCC associated housing.
     We enjoyed the leftovers of Alex's homemade Irish Stew (secret ingredient was quite a lot of brown sauce) along with some mead and the whisky-aged stout.  Tonight was filled with good food and good company.

Day Seventy-One - 20/11/2012 - Cork

     I found a treasure at Tesco today.  Nice biscuits, paired with tea, and their less tea-suited cousin, the malted milk biscuit, for less than a Euro.  I couldn't wait to open these up, dip into a hot cup of tea, and enjoy.  The Nice biscuits come with "NICE" printed on them, taste like coconut, and complement breakfast tea perfectly.  Malted milk biscuits are heartier, sweeter, and buttery, worthy of dipping but also enjoyed alone.  Tea time never tasted so good.