After a lovely breakfast, we returned to Dublin. We drove around downtown until we found a parking lot, then set off for Trinity College. The campus is an interesting oasis within the city--once you're inside it's large gates, the noise of the city disappears. The campus has large green spaces and lots of beautiful buildings. We found the Old Library and went in to see the Book of Kells. You buy your tickets in the gift shop, then go through an exhibit about Medieval manuscripts. The exhibit was quite good. The neatest thing about it was that they had a lot of pictures of pages from the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow blown up to about 8 feet tall, so you could see lots of detail. After shouldering our way through the crowded exhibit, we came to the books themselves. The Book of Kells, which is in two volumes, the Book of Durrow, and another manuscript are displayed in a case in the middle of a dimly lit room. It took a little while for us to get our turn, but not very long.

Wow. We were afraid the book might be an anticlimax, but even the volume that was open to a fairly plain page was amazing. The minute detail of the decoration was absolutely incredible. Kells and Durrow are both smaller than we thought they would be. The Book of Durrow was interesting because it had been torn up at some point, and all the pages are stitched together.

After seeing the Book of Kells, we went into the Long Room--this is the big vault of the library. It is a huge long room (clever, huh?) with little shelf-lined niches along the walls. It is a really tall room too--when it was first built, the shelves were about 18-20 feet high, but then the library needed more room, so they added another story above it, and now the shelves go up for 30-40 feet. Just the number of books in the room was amazing. This room also contains the oldest harp in Ireland, dating from the Late Middle Ages.

Then we were dumped back in the gift shop, where we bought a CD-Rom containing a complete digitised version of the Book of Kells--whee!

Our next stop was the Guinness Brewery. We had a long walk to get there. On our walk, we passed Dublin Castle--it's a very silly castle that was built in many different periods (although mostly in the 18th and 19th centuries), and has a ludicrous jumble of Medieval, Neoclassical, Gothic, and dumb styles. So we laughed at the castle, wandered around a brick path shaped like a Celtic knot in a courtyard, then continued on our way to the brewery.

We finally arrived at the brewery. There was a really big line to get in, but it moved quickly, so we didn't have to wait too long. We bought our tickets (which consisted of a little plastic Guinness trinket in a plastic wrapper), and went into the exhibit. It's a self-guided tour, and all in all, we were really impressed with it. The tour is well-designed so the crowds flowed through it without too much hassle. It was really interesting learning about the 4 ingredients of Guinness (water, barley, hops, and yeast), and how they're carefully processed. It was also interesting learning about the philanthropic activities of the Guinness family. They had a nifty video showing a cooper making a wood barrel by hand. They also had some really ridiculous exhibits that were only tangentially related, like a bunch of text panels with trivia about Irish pubs, and an exhibit about the modes of transportation that have carried Guinness over the years. Perhaps they had all of these silly things to take up all the floors of the brewery so that tourists would end up on the top floor, where everyone turned in the plastic wrappers from their tickets and received a free pint. This must be the tallest building in Dublin, and has a fantastic panoramic view of the whole city. We sat up there and wrote postcards to our families (which we of course forgot to mail until the day before we left) and drank our pints. Well, Jonathan drank two pints and Morgan drank a few sips.

By the time we got back to the City Centre, it was too late to do any more sight-seeing, so we wandered to Grafton Street, a pedestrian-only cobbled street lined with expensive stores. On a little side-street we found an organic/vegetarian restaurant called Cornucopia. We had a fantastic dinner there--for 9 euro each, we got giant heaping plates of really tasty food. The place is small, and since we were sitting at a table for three, an Irish lady joined us, and we had a lovely talk with her about the job market in Ireland and the state of the world.

Our next plan was to wander around a few parks in Dublin, but since the sun was setting, the parks were closing, so that plan was thwarted. So Plan B was a pub, and we found a really nifty one with a great big sculpture of a man's face on the wall, and the man's mouth was a fireplace. So we sat next to the fire and enjoyed our drinks, and then went back to the B&B for the night. We were lulled to sleep by a rainy windy storm outside.