Dublin (2004)

Dublin is unexpectedly Goth. I love it. Now it totally makes sense how Dublin and its pale, sooty Gothic cathedral were sources for Bram Stoker in creating the vampire imagery in Dracula.

The Guinness brewery takes up blocks and blocks and blocks -- a chocolate-brown brick compound with beautiful black iron gates with the gold harp insignia as ornaments. The street signs are written in both Irish and English. Irish has no vowels and is completely inscrutable to me. No intuitive translation possibilities at all, as with a Romance language.

Tea: it's impossible to get a bad cup anywhere! There are tubes of brown and white sugar provided, and milk. I went to the famous Bewley's Oriental Tea house and sat in a small Victorian tea room under the stairs, where a fire blazed merrily in the fireplace. Bewley's is evidently a popular spot for Sunday breakfast and it was very crowded. A middle-aged man and his elderly mother sit at the next table and I snoop on their conversation. It seems to have something to do with a business or investment matter. Both of them solidly curse "the bastard!" repeatedly and chain-smoke.

Then down O'Connell streets, both upper and lower. Road construction tears up the boulevards. A trolley system to replace the one ripped out in the 1960's is being installed. To the River Liffey, across O'Connell Street bridge and down the quay to Ha'Penny bridge with its white spires and curlicues. The Liffey is shallow and muddy, but swift-moving. It's a beautiful, sunny cold Sunday. Young families are out everywhere with babies in strollers. Dublin is a city of life-size bronze statues: "the tart with the cart," "the floozy in the jacuzzi," James Joyce, and, of course, Oscar Wilde polychromed, with young gay men stretched out next to him for photographs.

Dublin seems very clean, very cosmopolitan, very young and very hip these days due to the booming high-tech industry here. The litter bins are black with gold decorations like the Guinness cans. I'm having a hard time adjusting to the "look left" required of pedestrians because of vehicles driving on the opposite side of the road to that which I'm accustomed. The desk clerk says the Dublin buses are undependable, so just walk. It's easily done, I found out.

There are bullet holes in walls of buildings near my hotel. I should have done my research on the events of 1916, aside from reading Yeats and The Dubliners again before my arrival. I'm so ignorant about the battle for Irish independence it's appalling. Much of Dublin's architecture is beautifully Georgian and there are still horse-drawn carriages to be hired at St. Stephen's Green. Rows and rows of nearly identical townhouses with painted doors -- red, green, yellow, blue -- and lace curtains in the windows of their upper stories. Elaborate door knockers on some of the painted doors. Brick streets.

Guinness built blocks of tenement houses for its employees of red brick with tiny courtyards between them. I can see the ghosts of children in turn-of-the-century black stockings playing on the stoops. There's an alcohol treatment center established in the 1700's just across from the Guinness brewery. The nutty warm smell of hops wafts across the street.

Black painted shop facades with gold letters, like in Paris, sit side by side with slick, modernist buildings. Nothing's taller than about six stories so it's not a towering, modern vertical city and skyscrapers don't choke out the rather subdued light.

Betting parlors everywhere, where men sit on stools and gamble away their hard-earned wages. A gypsy fortune-teller glimpsed in a glass-ceiling arcade market from the 19th century. Elaborate building facades made of glazed, ceramic tiles, dark green, or else, the color of toffee. An old sign on a building advertising a cure for baldness. The band U2's swanky bar. The Gaiety. The General Post Office with bullet holes in its walls from 1916 and a statue of a fallen patriot.

They say "sorry" here rather than "excuse me" or "pardon." They call you "lady" rather than "ma'am" or "miss." In a pub I saw an old advertising mirror for Schweppe's Lethia and Moldavia.

I will definitely buy a red plaid toque with a pompom on top while I am here. And when I wear it back home, I will remember Dublin.