Dublin City Art and Culture
If you want to go touristy in Dublin, the city obliges in spades: there are waxworks, and tours of breweries and distilleries, and a tour bus that I kept running into filled with cheering folks wearing plastic Viking helmets. But I didn't feel like giving over a morning to playing Brunhild or recovering from a tasting room hangover. Instead, I went through the guidebooks and edited a list of things to do that seemed appealing.
What I found out, after a day or two, was that Dublin's best museums also happen to be free. Although most guidebooks direct the first-time Dublin visitor to Trinity College's exhibit of the Book of Kells, at $8 admission I found it a pricey disappointment. Only four pages from the celebrated medieval illustrated manuscript were on display (they are changed every few months), under glass, in light so low that I strained to see their details. Perhaps to compensate for its smallness, the exhibit was preceded by a much larger room filled with an audiovisual display about illustrated manuscripts.
By contrast, Dublin's National Museum, which is free, is a treasure trove, a cornucopia of gold artifacts and jewelry from Ireland's ancient Celtic past. Gold deposits once dotted the island, and the Celts turned the precious metal into exquisitely simple bracelets, cloak pins and artifacts. A display in a sunken area of the main floor showcases the oldest gold, which dates from 2200 to 500 B.C. In another wing are examples of more elaborate medieval Celtic gold and silver work, including the famous Ardagh Chalice, and several beautifully filigreed and inlaid brooches, circle pins of various sizes used to fasten men's and women's shawls at the shoulder.
I almost missed Dublin's best free museum -- and one of the best I've visited lately anywhere -- by leaving the Chester Beatty Library until the afternoon of my last day, on a day I was running late. But when I saw the sign in front of the building that said ''Winner of Europe's Best Museum Award 2002,'' I decided to skip nearby Dublin Castle (the Beatty library is in the castle's backyard) to have more time in what turned out to be a stunning, world-class pan-Asian art collection.
Beatty was a wealthy American mining engineer of the early 20th century who emigrated to London and developed a passion for collecting Oriental and Middle Eastern art. Spending part of his last years in Ireland with his collection, he willed it to the Irish government on his death. Beatty had eclectic tastes -- the pieces range from Indian miniatures to Japanese woodblock prints to Qing dynasty pottery -- and he was particularly interested in printing. The most stunning area of the beautifully arranged museum is the section devoted to an extraordinary collection of Korans from all over the Islamic world. I spent more than an hour working my way through these hand-illustrated manuscripts that shimmered with gold leaf and deep inks, whose flowing black Arabic script unfurled across the delicate pages like ribbons in the wind.
Such multicultural treats were not what I expected to find in Dublin, and I savored them along with more hometown ones, like an hour spent over tea and cakes and Champagne in the swagged and mirrored Victorian-style lounge of the Shelbourne Hotel, or watching ladies in sweaters and pearls chat over copies of the Irish Times. I braved the narrow streets of Temple Bar early on a Saturday night. Temple Bar -- nicknamed ''Temple Barf'' by locals -- is the Dublin neighborhood where collegiate partying reaches Olympic levels. Every other storefront seems to house a pub, and all have the same doorway decoration: a large, menacing-looking bouncer with a shaved head, a black overcoat and a cellphone wire plugged in his ear.
Over dinner at Mermaid Café, a local favorite for the updated Irish food emphasizing fresh fish and organic vegetables, my Dublin friend, Perry, explained the Temple Bar scene. Because of Dublin's legendary pub culture and its relatively low prices compared with London, the city has become a magnet for British groups celebrating ''stag and hen'' prewedding parties (one reason weekend hotel rates jump in Dublin). The men in black are there to keep things under control. But Perry advised me not to take Temple Bar at face value; it had been renovated by the city with the intention of creating a cultural and arts enclave, not an Animal House.
Article credit: DAISANN MCLANE, nytimes.com
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