Tuesday is archaeology day

Anyway, I found out today that my roommate was a French girl called Stephanie. She was meant to have come with her boyfriend, but he had discovered at the last minute his passport was out of date. A lesson for us all there...

I headed South across the river, and poppoed in briefly to Trinity College, which looks a bit like this:

Lots of tourists, and not very exciting in my view, so I went on the the National Museum, to see the archaeology. I'd wanted to come here ever since my Celtic Studies course. Thankfully, although I had a headache and felt a bit grotty, I found this to be an awesome collection. Pictures are sadly not allowed, but it's one of those rare places where everything is world class, and my jaw was dropping for most of the day. There's stuff from Newgrange and Knowth, an Egyptian collection, lots of Bronze age and Iron age bits, an exhibition of gold artifacts from the bronze age on, which is quite incredible and unique, and some medieval stuff. I spent pretty much all day looking, and didn't get through it all, even though the Viking bit was closed (the roof collapsed unexpectedly.)

One of the best bits of all was the special exhibition on bog bodies. There were 5 or 6 on show, which is about 5 more than I've ever seen before, so rare they are. I hadn't realised before that when these brown, wrinkled, dessicated looking things come out of the ground, they are actually soft and fleshy. There was a video of an autopsy on one which brought this out. I stayed in that exhibit for an hour and a half, so good it was.

What else today? Well, I kept nipping out, because my attention span was suffering with the bug. There's several more nice parks on that side, worth a visit. NOT worth visiting is the Natural History Museum. Ye gods, it can't have changed in 100 years, and in a bad way. The National Portrait Gallery next door is a lot better though (but the cake is overpriced!)

In the evening, I went to see a play, "A Pleasing Terror", at Andrew's Lane Theatre, which was a one man show, telling 2 of the ghost stories of M.R.James. It was extremely well done, with the actor just playing James himself telling the stories, in a small candlelit room. He began hunched over the candles, half-lit, and blew them out as the play went on. Definitely worth seeing if it comes to the UK, it really brought out some of the comedic side to the stories, as well as the horror.

written by  martin_b on April 17, 2007 from Dublin, Ireland
from the travel blog: Eastern Ireland
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