Temple Bar Revelers
We left Kinsale with just enough time to drive the four hours plus to Dublin in order to drop off the car. Drop off the car!!!!!! As we were loading it in the morning I noticed that it appeared we had scraped the left rear wheel fender. This news bummed out Steve to a great degree as he had felt he had managed to drive that harrowing four weeks without incident. With a sober feel to our entire return we managed to pull into the car rental place with much more skill than we had exited it on the first day. We decided to call attention to our fender to the check-in guy. He looked at his photo record and declared those scrapes were there previously! Oh happy day again.
We dragged our luggage to the curb and tried to hail a taxi to take us to our StayCity Serviced Apartments building near the old Dublinia haunts. Here we would stay three nights and visit with two old friends from our college days—Noel and Amanda Sharkey. Our attempts to get a taxi to stop were witnessed by a woman across the street who dashed over to us to see if we needed help. Note this behavior, Americans: when you see travelers with bags looking lost, cross the street and give detailed directions on what they say they need. This very take-charge and friendly gal recommended we walk a half block, dive into a path through a hedge, cross the GasWorks development and find a taxi stand. All was true and we crossed into a very amazing apartment complex that we never otherwise would have seen. I think the Irish are the most hospitable people I have met; this kind of "out-of-their-way" encounter happens frequently here.
Gasworks apartments in an old gas storage tank, mightily and creatively changed
A pillar.
Interior of the old gas storage tank at ground level.
Looking up to the light.
We finally met our friends and got into our apartment around four PM. The apartment was utilitarian but with its modernist mass-produced art, granite countertops, and other nice touches it did not feel like a dorm room. There was a washer and dryer, complete kitchen and utensils, two bedrooms, an unventilated bathroom that also therefore doubled as a sauna. The dryer had no ventilation either so it steamed your clothes to a high swedish towel state for hours— this really dried nothing, so the balcony rails came in handy. This StayCity business is huge. Wedding parties, college friends, families, and any other "community of cohorts" you could imagine packed each apartment with many bodies. Its location near the River Liffey and Temple Bar was ideal. The desk clerks were working constantly checking people in and out. It had 110 apartments spread through three buildings. People came in and out and shouted in the courtyards all night and day long. We kept our windows open for air, but closed them in order to hush the seething crowd.
We have known Noel and Amanda since the early 1980's. They were at that time ensconced at Stanford for a post-doctorate research gig, and Steve and I were going to UC Berkeley. A mutual friend had introduced him to Steve. We have kept in touch as our children have grown from babies to adults and have had nothing but the best, most hilarious times, even when, for example, they were staying with us when the Great Oakland Fire happened in 1991. I remember Noel saying "Oh, that is a strange dark cloud in the sky this morning!"
Noel is a very smart man, an Irish-born, England-based professor of computer science at the University of Sheffield, and a famous commentator on the ethics and limits of artificial intelligence and military drone use. He once hosted a TV show called Robot Wars, and he has been Britain's Ambassador of Science who also dabbles in conceptual techno-art. But really the main thing that Noel is—the goal that all of these illustrious credentials only exist to serve—is a storyteller extraordinairre. We knew when we signed up our last few days in Dublin with Noel and his wife Amanda, a senior lecturer at Sheffied as well, that our last days would be a riot of laughs, stories, marathons of gab and Guinness, and just all out fun.
This would be the perfect ending, a flame of activity, catching up, and talk before being shoveled onto our plane in three days. We headed out to Temple Bar, an area of Dublin that we had avoided for its boisterousness on the first leg of the trip. We went to THE Temple Bar bar, a long-standing purveyor of spirits that was jam-packed with tourists, mostly American. This "venerable" establishment failed to keep its dustier layers of history. It had interesting interior rooms that were open to the sky so that smokers could technically be outside. Its decorations were rather tidy and lacked the archaeological layers that we saw in Doolin. I think they may have spiffed it up a little too far.
There were, through the evening, a million tales to be told. The next day Steve and I lay in bed in the morning and tried to merely list the number of tales we had heard in the previous evening. There was the one about being accidentally locked naked out of his hotel room when he went to pee in the middle of the night. Or the one where he was expected to be at a prize presentation for a colleague at a conference but instead had disappeared off for a beer at the moment, and only in Ireland would that explanation of his faux pas be heralded with "I wish I had thought of that!" Or the story of an art installation he and a friend did that was SO minimalist as to consist of dust, placed randomly in a museum setting with no signage— that even they could never find their commissioned piece afterwards. There were about nine more that we were able to remember but most cannot in good conscience be repeated here. Or I am just being lazy. You will never know.
It was a fun first night together and we managed to get to sleep by 2AM which is very staid compared to the past revels in our youth.
We have known Noel and Amanda since the early 1980's. They were at that time ensconced at Stanford for a post-doctorate research gig, and Steve and I were going to UC Berkeley. A mutual friend had introduced him to Steve. We have kept in touch as our children have grown from babies to adults and have had nothing but the best, most hilarious times, even when, for example, they were staying with us when the Great Oakland Fire happened in 1991. I remember Noel saying "Oh, that is a strange dark cloud in the sky this morning!"
Noel is a very smart man, an Irish-born, England-based professor of computer science at the University of Sheffield, and a famous commentator on the ethics and limits of artificial intelligence and military drone use. He once hosted a TV show called Robot Wars, and he has been Britain's Ambassador of Science who also dabbles in conceptual techno-art. But really the main thing that Noel is—the goal that all of these illustrious credentials only exist to serve—is a storyteller extraordinairre. We knew when we signed up our last few days in Dublin with Noel and his wife Amanda, a senior lecturer at Sheffied as well, that our last days would be a riot of laughs, stories, marathons of gab and Guinness, and just all out fun.
Noel Sharkey in his element.
Amanda Sharkey and her biggest fan.
This would be the perfect ending, a flame of activity, catching up, and talk before being shoveled onto our plane in three days. We headed out to Temple Bar, an area of Dublin that we had avoided for its boisterousness on the first leg of the trip. We went to THE Temple Bar bar, a long-standing purveyor of spirits that was jam-packed with tourists, mostly American. This "venerable" establishment failed to keep its dustier layers of history. It had interesting interior rooms that were open to the sky so that smokers could technically be outside. Its decorations were rather tidy and lacked the archaeological layers that we saw in Doolin. I think they may have spiffed it up a little too far.
There were, through the evening, a million tales to be told. The next day Steve and I lay in bed in the morning and tried to merely list the number of tales we had heard in the previous evening. There was the one about being accidentally locked naked out of his hotel room when he went to pee in the middle of the night. Or the one where he was expected to be at a prize presentation for a colleague at a conference but instead had disappeared off for a beer at the moment, and only in Ireland would that explanation of his faux pas be heralded with "I wish I had thought of that!" Or the story of an art installation he and a friend did that was SO minimalist as to consist of dust, placed randomly in a museum setting with no signage— that even they could never find their commissioned piece afterwards. There were about nine more that we were able to remember but most cannot in good conscience be repeated here. Or I am just being lazy. You will never know.
It was a fun first night together and we managed to get to sleep by 2AM which is very staid compared to the past revels in our youth.
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