travelogue: ireland part 1

Hello, paid subscribers. I wanted to write some non-music things about this trip and I also wanted to thank all of you for your actual, tangible support, so here's two posts (one upcoming) that are only for you. I plan to do more of this in the future. Thanks again.

It is all Rebecca Solnit's fault.

I love her work and her writing and it was probably during the pandemic when someone had a sale and I bought up the books I hadn't already read, one of which was her A Book of Migrations [bookshop.org | amazon]. She journeys, mostly a combination of walking and local buses, from small town to small town, visiting ancient wells and pilgrimage sites. I was not going to do that because that is not me, but I was always reading and bookmarking and thinking about it, and then Patti Smith announced two dates in Dublin at the end of June. I decided that if I could get tickets, I would go, clearly forgetting for a moment who I actually was.

What I didn't know until March or April was that Taylor Swift had scheduled three dates in Dublin over the same weekend as Patti, which meant that accommodation was both hard to find and expensive. The hotel I found was new-ish and in a less-desirable area, which is probably why it was still available when I stumbled on it, literally just by using Google Maps and clicking on every hotel and then going to the hotel's website to check availability. I also had to go with the non-changeable / non-transferrable / non-refundable rate, which I was okay with because I wanted to go to Ireland with or without Patti Smith being there and because I also believe in buying travel insurance; if something went awry I might be disappointed but I wouldn't be out the money.

This is what I reminded myself when I got to the gate for my connecting flight in Toronto – I flew Air Canada out of Windsor, which is just across the river from Detroit; there were not a lot of great choices for Dublin and I already had Jet Blue completely bork my return flight and had to rebook the entire journey back in March – only to find that because the flight from Windsor to Toronto was so delayed there was no way my bags were going to make it and they don't want to fly your bags later without you for both security and customs reasons. But they had to put me up in a hotel and put me on the same flight the next day.

Which was then delayed four times because of equipment problems. Air Canada pushed the departure time back twice before giving up and deciding the solution was to get another plane, the problem being that my 8:30pm flight would now leave at 12:45pm. When I posted that I was frustrated about this, I got a lot of well-meaning but tone-deaf well safety1!!! as though at any point I had suggested that the airline throw caution to the winds. And also: no matter how good the reason, it still sucks to lose a day and now I was losing another half a day. I called my hotel (and later emailed them as well) to tell them I was still coming and that they should not give my room away.

We landed at 12, I was on the 1pm airport bus, it was warm and sunny and I changed clothes and walked out the door at 2:30pm, determined to salvage as much of the day as I could. I walked across the Liffey and cut through Temple Bar to get to Dublin Castle and the Chester Beatty Library. Chester Beatty was kind of like a 1920s Paul Allen, except that instead of buying up anything that Jimi Hendrix ever touched, Chester Beatty and his wife liked buying ancient manuscripts and other small beautiful things from other cultures. It is a jaw-dropping collection of artifacts – I was particularly fond of this illuminated manuscript that had a painting of the Last Supper inside the letter C – but I did walk around wondering who this stuff actually belonged to and if it shouldn't go back to where it came from.

I was meeting friends for dinner at 5:30pm just on the other side of the river so I was trying to slot in activities that were within the same general radius. My next stop was the Phil Lynott statue, which wasn't here the first time I came to Dublin in 1984, and I just plain ran out of time to see it when I was last here in 2012 seeing Mr. Springsteen. I like when a place recognizes people and events that are important and not just the ones that go in the history books.

The next thing on my list was an art gallery I've been following for a while on Instagram (the Kerlin Gallery), I think I learned about it because Guggi (yes, that Guggi) has gone there a few times. I had to cross Grafton Street to get there and I severely underestimated what Grafton Street was going to be like on a week in which the media estimated there would be an extra 600,000 people in Dublin.

Many years ago, Max Weinberg was playing with one of his side projects at the Iridium, which is a jazz club located in the basement of a building on Broadway and 51st Street. One of the editors I worked with at Billboard had decided she wanted to see the show, got put on the guest list and invited me to join her. I walked out of the 7 train on a Saturday night in the summer and immediately went into stealth ninja mode, which meant dodging hordes of tourists walking 4-6 abreast, groups of teenagers milling around, hustlers wearing character costumes, and plain old normal people trying to get to their Broadway show on time. It felt a lot like being in a human version of Frogger. And that, my friends, is exactly what it felt like trying to get across Grafton Street on Wednesday afternoon, just with different accents.

But Dorothy Cross' exhibit at the Kerlin was brilliant and it was worth dodging the teeming masses. I hit two bookstores and then met my friends for really excellent Thai food at Red Torch Ginger. American Thai is usually so one-dimensional and this was absolutely not.

The friends went to a speakeasy that didn't open until 9. I went back to my hotel. I slept on the plane but plane sleep is not real sleep. I got back to the room and sat down on the bed and thought "I'll just lie down for a minute and then unpack / get ready for bed / plan tomorrow" and that went about as well as you think it did. I finally unpacked and got back in bed and was sound asleep by 10pm.

I had a full Thursday planned which I then pared down considerably once I came to my senses. I had a 10am tour booked at 14 Henrietta Street. If you've ever been to the Tenement Museum in NYC this is very similar (and we even had someone on our tour who worked there) and it was the kind of thing I love, where I'm getting a lot of history through stories about average people. The old Georgian building was once a winter home to very rich people, and later became a tenement building where each room in the house became 17 studio apartments and over 100 people lived there. The last resident moved out in 1979. The street itself is fascinating and picturesque, and I wandered back down towards my hotel to get the #9 bus and head towards Cedarwood Road. I'm going to write in depth about this so I'll just explain for the folks who don't know that it was Bono's childhood home. A lot of us have iPhones so you all had the record with the song about it on your phone, and if you like U2 and saw the Innocence & Experience tour you saw the house on that big screen every night.

On the way back into center city, I did some refresher web searches on the song "Raised by Wolves," which was inspired by a multi-location car bombing incident in Dublin in 1974, and was the largest loss of life in one day during the Troubles. I was listening to the record on my way back into town and remembered the stories and wanted the real world context. I didn't realize that one of the locations was right down the street from my hotel. There's a marker in the sidewalk, people just walk over it every day on their way to or from O'Connell Street. No one has taken responsibility for the explosions to this day. The marker is only from 2008.

This is an example of why I fucking love having a phone and an international data plan, the ability to check something or call an audible on the spur of the moment. I did enough travel pre-internet where you had to use, like, actual books (I remember cutting up the Rough Guide to India in the 90s and only taking the sections for the places I was traveling to, in order to decrease the weight) and even if I hadn't? It's still better living through technology to be able to look things up and check a map and not walk for 20 minutes in the wrong direction in a bad part of town, just like it's infinitely preferable to not have to carry frickin travellers checks and just go to an ATM when you get to the country.

The original plan was to get a sandwich or a quick lunch and go back to the hotel for a nap, but I wasn't tired and also did not need to get to the venue at 3pm so I called an audible. When I was here in 1984 I did all of the obligatory major tourist sites (Guinness factory, Book of Kells, etc.) but I decided that I wanted to go back to the General Post Office which has a museum in its basement about the 1916 Easter Rising, which used the GPO as the headquarters. I know I did this in 1984 but after seeing the marker I was a combination of sad and furious and thought it was worth giving myself a refresher on that part of Ireland's history. It's very detailed and very well done and I'm glad I did it.

I then grabbed a sandwich and a snack from the Tesco near the hotel, changed my shoes and switched to my concert purse, and hopped the 123 bus to the venue, arriving around 4:30. I was #8 in the queue and it was a jolly collection of folks from Italy, Berlin, the UK, Wales, and of course from around Ireland until the door opened at 6:30 and we were allowed into the showroom at 7pm. (The show report went out this morning so I will not be reprising it here.)

Afterwards, I made my way out of the venue and spotted the same bus line that got me there waiting at the stop and was absolutely delighted to jog down the block in time to catch it. I didn't realize how much I miss having effective public transportation. I've literally utilized every single form of it that exists in the week that I've been here and it is delightful. You see the country, you're next to the people, you overhear the conversations. I listened to multiple old-age pensioners (the vernacular for senior citizen) talk about how the Pride parade was happening on Saturday – there were Pride flags everywhere in Dublin – and I always kind of held my breath waiting for the response but without fail the response was always something like "wonderful atmosphere."

Friday morning I stood on O'Connell Street watching the commuters streaming into town while I waited for the bus for my guided tour to Newgrange, which is one of the most significant Neolithic sites in Europe, and is older than both Stonehenge and the Pyramids. I don't usually do organized tours but I didn't want to rent a car and this particular one was run by a woman who is a historian and if I was going to do an organized tour I want, you know, as much actual history as I can possibly get. I like access to experts, even when the experts freely admit that there is so much they do not know because it is not knowable. The tour took us to the Hill of Tara as well as the mounds at Knowth and Newgrange itself. You can't go inside Knowth but the site is enormous and extensive and the guide was both incredibly knowledgable and clearly loved her job. The draw at Knowth is the massive amount of neolithic art that decorates the outside.

At Newgrange, I wasn't expecting to be as overwhelmed as I was. It was one of those moments where your body you're getting goosebumps but don't quite understand why. My tour included the ability to go inside the passage tomb and I wasn't sure I was going to deal with it but there's a life-sized model at the visitor's center and I walked through it and thought, okay, I can do this. They take you inside in groups of 15 and while I was waiting my turn, I was chatting with the people behind me who were talking about when they had gone to the Pyramids and I said that I had done fine at the pyramids until I took a moment and thought about the sheer weight of the stones that were above my head. "Maybe don't think about it now," they suggested.

The chamber inside Newgrange is smaller. It is tiny. It is not the same level of precision engineering but also? It is older and they had less sophisticated tools and the inside of the tomb has not been touched since it was found. The people who built it managed to make it waterproof just by stacking the stones just so. They turn off the lights and simulate the solstice, the only time of year that the inner chamber is illuminated.

On the way back into Dublin, I was having a lovely nap and thinking about everything I had seen when we ran right into traffic. The guide estimated it was going to take us two hours to get back into town and my reaction to that was to close my eyes again. I knew Patti wouldn't be onstage until 9pm and you know, I have spent a lot of time in the front row at Patti Smith shows, the tradeoff was worth it. Except the traffic cleared up shortly afterwards, the bus dropped us off immediately adjacent to the 123 bus and I could see from the illuminated information sign that one would be arriving in less than five minutes. I picked up a sandwich again (because I didn't get to eat lunch – the only option was the cafe at the visitor's center and the line was too long) and was in the queue with #18 on my hand a little after 6pm.

(I had actually asked the tour bus driver if there was another drop off point that was closer to the venue and his advice was to just get a taxi from O'Connell Street. I realize that for many people that would have been fine advice but there was absolutely zero reason to do that. Just get on a bus! This was the closest to the venue but there were many others that would have brought you within a few minutes' walk. Ah, public transit.)

The next paid-subscriber-only post will go out at the end of the week. If you have any ideas for other paid subscriber posts, let me know in the comments. Thanks again so much for being a paid subscriber and thanks for reading.