Dublin Again

A plane, trains, buses, a minibus, a horse-drawn carriage, and a ferry. I rode them all on this trip to and in Ireland. This morning, I added to my train trip complement with a journey from Galway back to Dublin again, where I started my time in Ireland.

The train left at 9:30 a.m., too early to do anything in Galway. So, I have nothing to report from there today.

Galway to Dublin

The train travelled under mostly dreary skies, with occasional rain. As we got closer to Dublin, the dark grey clouds thinned to lighter grey patches in some places. The occasional small blue gap even opened up, but they were never positioned such as to give quarter to the sun.

Along the way, views out the window included farms, fields, cows, sheep, individual trees, forests, lone or small clusters of homes and other buildings, and towns around the stops. Those didn’t all appear simultaneously, of course. That would be too much of a jumble for nature or the works of humans.

As is the norm for Ireland, the Emerald Isle, shades of green predominated the landscape’s palette.

The topology from Galway to Dublin is primarily fairly flat, but with some low, gently rolling hills.

After an uneventful train trip, I arrived at the Dublin station at about noon and took a taxi to my hotel, the same hotel I stayed in at the start of this Ireland odyssey.

Dublin Again

When I mapped out the days for this trip so I could book hotels and transportation, my intent for today was simply to get back to Dublin to catch my morning flight back home to Toronto tomorrow. I figured I’d use whatever time I had here today to take in some sundry sights I didn’t have time for during my six days here at the start of the trip.

That’s exactly what I did. I undertook only two activities, visits to the National Gallery of Ireland and The Old Jameson Distillery.

National Gallery of Ireland

The EU has a regulation stipulating that all tourists who spend three or more days in Europe must visit at least one major art gallery during their stay to look at the pretty pictures.

Those are the rules. I don’t make them up. Well, okay, I did make that one up. But it’s always felt like an EU rule to me.

(I wrote “pretty pictures” above to needle one specific art historian. You know who you are.)

I hadn’t been to a major art gallery during my time in Ireland yet. So, in case the EU does indeed have such a law, I visited the National Gallery of Ireland. I’ve enjoyed Ireland, but I’d rather go home tomorrow than to jail.

The National Gallery of Ireland is a largeish gallery with a few levels, spread across two wings. I found it difficult to navigate.

Then again, I find it hard to navigate through any space with more than two rooms if they’re not in a straight line. And even in that, I’m being overly generous with myself. I can get lost in a single square room if it has more than two doors.

I inadvertently looped back to a couple of rooms twice. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed a section or two of the gallery.

The National Gallery of Ireland is large enough that I reached my gallery glazing state well before I worked my way through the gallery. That is not a typo. I said glazing, not gazing. By that, I mean the point at which my eyes glaze over and I approach a near-catatonic state. I can rarely go for more than an hour in an art gallery—and often less—before I reach my gallery glazing state.

Most of the gallery’s pieces are oil on canvas paintings, but it also has a few paintings and drawings that use other media, a few photographs, and a small number of sculptures.

The works date from the fourteenth up to the twenty-first century. They include some paintings done by some of the old masters. Old? Dead, I’d say.

I didn’t recognize many of the names listed beside the paintings. I’m sure not all of them were old masters. Some were probably old runners-up to masters. And some might have been merely master wannabes.

But I did recognize some names. The art historian I needled above undoubtedly knows a great many more of them. I’m a philistine.

The names I recognized included Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (although I knew only the Caravaggio part), Titian, Jacobo Tintoretto, Johannes Vermeer, and Peter Paul Reubens.

There’s also a painting by an unnamed follower of, but not Hieronymus Bosch. I’ve seen some of Hieronymus Bosch’s other paintings elsewhere in my travels. (I think it was before I started this journal.) The ones I’ve seen had a similar feel to the one by his follower, namely dismally foreboding. Man, that guy was acutely dark. He probably could have benefited greatly from intensive therapy. Come to think of it, was therapy a thing in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century or did everyone just paint?

The gallery houses a small collection of portraits of major figures in Irish culture and society. Most of the artists who created those portraits are Irish. The media includes both painting and photography.

By the time I got out of the gallery, the sun had come out. It didn’t last long before ominous clouds rolled in and defeated the sun. However, the sunny interlude was sufficient to cure my gallery-glazing malady.

And the sun did claim a few more victories during the rest of the afternoon and evening, including a few mostly sunny bouts.

Here are some pictures of the famous dudes’ paintings:

Old Jameson Distillery

I did the beer thing at the Guinness Storehouse when I was in Dublin at the start of this trip. So the only Irish experience left for me to have here was Irish whiskey.

True, there was whiskey in the Irish coffee I had at the Red Fox Inn Pub on the Ring of Kerry tour I took. But that doesn’t count. That’s Irish coffee, a different experience.

I checked the Irish whiskey box for this trip with a tour of the Old Jameson Distillery.

Jameson “Tour”

John Jameson founded his Bow Street Distillery in 1780, named “John Jameson & Son, Irish Whiskey.”

Jameson doesn’t distill any of its whiskey in Dublin anymore. It now uses a larger distillery in Middleton, Cork County to make all of its whiskey for both local and global sales.

So the Old Jameson Distillery tour isn’t a tour of a functioning distillery. Instead, it’s an educational experience that moves through three rooms in one of the buildings that used to be part of the old distillery. In addition to the tour rooms, the building contains a Jameson merchandise shop and a Jameson bar.

In the first tour room, the guide went through a scripted talk on the history of Jameson. While she spoke, a video was projected on a table in the front of the room. An instrumental soundtrack played low enough that the guide had no difficulty talking over it. Lighting highlighted displays on the wall at the appropriate moments in the script. I don’t remember much of that history other than what I mentioned in the preceding paragraphs.

In the second room, the tour guide went through a script on Jameson’s whiskey-making processes. There was no video this time, but lights highlighted displays on the wall at the appropriate moment again.

I do remember some information from the process room. For one, whiskey is essentially beer that’s been distilled and aged in casts. The first steps in the production process are the same for both.

Jameson uses two types of casks for aging, sherry casks and bourbon casks. These aren’t casks like those used for making either sherry or bourbon. They are casks that were used for making them. Jameson blends, or not, as appropriate, whiskeys from the different casks and different aging periods to make its different whiskeys.

The Wonder of the Show

The guide amazed me. She spoke the script live by heart, throwing in the occasional brief line of humour that didn’t seem scripted. But here’s the thing. Her talk remained synchronized with the video and lights in the first room and the lights in the second room.

She spoke without notes. I saw no teleprompter. And she didn’t hold a remote she could use to stop and restart the A/V to re-sync it to her speech. I suppose some unseen person could have done that, but an instrumental audio track played and I didn’t hear any gaps in that, nor did I see any pauses in the video in the first room. So, I don’t think anyone stopped or advanced it to stay in sync with the guide’s presentation.

I know that has absolutely nothing to do with whiskey or Jameson, but the guide’s ability impressed me nonetheless. Maybe it’s because decades ago, when I was a much younger man, I worked at a theme park of sorts (“theme park” gives the wrong impression, but I can’t think of a better term; it’s a long story). I’m convinced that I and the other staff back then would have struggled, often not successfully, to do what the guide did today.

The Third Room

I mentioned the tour has three rooms. The third is a tasting room.

Before getting to the tastings, because she didn’t have a timed script to follow in that room, and because the facility has multiple tasting rooms for different tour groups so she didn’t have to make way quickly for the next group, the guide asked if anyone had any questions.

Someone asked why it’s spelled “whiskey” in Ireland, but “whisky” in Scotland. The guide said that her understanding is that, at one time, both countries spelled it the same. But at some point, one country decided it needed to differentiate itself so it either added or dropped the “e.” She didn’t know which country did it or, therefore, which was the original spelling.

If any linguists read this and know the answer please provide it in the comments below.

Questions out of the way, we got on to the tastings.

Before we entered the tasting room, someone set up enough place settings for everyone on the tour. Each place setting consisted of three small glasses with a little whiskey in each and a larger glass with water. Each of the whiskey glasses had a different type of Jameson Whiskey.

According to the guide, the way to taste whiskey is to take the tasting glass, lift it, tilt it at a 45-degree angle, and then turn it several turns. Then put the glass down and look at what in Ireland, or at least at Jameson, they call “tears.” If it were wine they’d be called “legs.” How quickly the tears run down the glass tells you the thickness of the whiskey.

Then you sniff the whiskey, putting your nose right into the glass and breathing in through your nose, but with your mouth open at the same time. Examine the scents your nose picks up.

Then taste it by taking a little into your mouth and holding it on your tongue for a few seconds before swallowing it so the flavours can open up on your tongue.

We did this with each of the three in turn, taking a palate-clearing drink of water between each, and comparing and contrasting them. The guide encouraged us to not drink all of the tasters of each right away so we’d have some to go back to and compare.

One of Jameson’s whiskeys (I forget the name) we tasted leans heavily (or maybe exclusively, I forget that too) on whiskey from sherry casks. Jameson sells it in only a very limited number of countries. The problem is, according to the guide, people don’t drink as much sherry these days, so Jameson can’t get as many sherry casks. The guide asked us to drink more sherry so they could make more of that whiskey.

After the tasting, the tour of course exits into the merchandise shop. That leads into the bar. In the latter, I turned in the coupon attached to my tour ticket for a Jameson-based mixed drink. (I could have also had it neat if I preferred.) It was very nice. I got happy.

Dublin Again?

If I were to plan this trip again knowing what I know now, I would spend more time in Kilkenny. There’s not more to “do” than what I did there as far as I could see, but it’d be nice to just enjoy its beauty a little more. I’d definitely come back to Dublin again too, but maybe spend one less day here in favour of another day in Kilkenny. Either that or I’d stay in Ireland a little longer and not just add a day to Kilkenny, but also see some of the places I didn’t get to see. I felt I gave an appropriate length of time to the other places I visited here in Ireland.

I had a lot of nice meals and a couple of great meals here. But, overall, I don’t think people usually come to Ireland for the culinary experiences. That having been said, if I had a bad meal here I’ve already forgotten it.

If I have one complaint about Ireland it’s the weather. I heard a few times here that this year has been wetter than usual, but Ireland is known for rain even in the normal years. It didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, rain the majority of the time I was here. But it was gloomily overcast for by far most of the time, without any need for imagination, stretched or not, to see that.

More sun would have been nice. Then again, if Ireland got too much sun and too little rain it’d be the Scorched Earth Island rather than the Emerald Isle. So there’s that to consider.

Would I come back? If I had come to Ireland when I was younger and had unlimited funds the answer would certainly be yes. But I’m no longer a young man and there are a lot of places I want to visit. Too much world. Too little time. So, we’ll see.

Barring an unexpected long delay of my flight home tomorrow, this will be the last entry for this trip. See you wherever, whenever,