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Ten things you didn't know about Dublin
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Visiting any city for the first time is an exercise in setting expectations. You can only read so much about the culture, nightlife and food in a guidebook before you need to experience the locals first hand, order a pint of Guinness or eat shepherd's pie and really visit a destination. Setting foot out into the city streets, you begin to compare your first hand experiences against everything that you thought you knew about a destination. In some facets, you're surprised and impressed by the difference; in others, you're underwhelmed.Taking advantage of some weekend work in the Emerald Isle, I recently spent some time in the capital city for my first trip to Ireland. I was moved most by the ten things below:
- You're never going to want to eat Shepherd's Pie at your local Irish pub again. No, Dublin isn't known for its pinky-up food culture, but the things that they get right they really get right.
- The city revolves around drinking. To that end, bar crawling in Dublin can be performed quite literally. One only needs to mosey down two or three store fronts before he or she discovers another pub almost identical to the one that was just left. It's disorienting enough having a bar on all four corners of every intersection in the downtown area – now try doing it with 17 pints of Smithwicks in your stomach. Currently, the drinking problem has become so profound that there is a massive public effort to curb binge drinking, the majority of which is found in telly and bus ads trying to guilt people out of overindulging.
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There isn't really that much to see besides the 976,000 bars. Yes, Dublin has a couple of excellent museums, Trinity College, Phoenix Park and the Guinness factory (does that even count?), but compared to some of the heavy hitters in the EU like Rome or Paris, Dublin's "cultural" fodder is a bit anemic -- which isn't to say that the city isn't worth visiting, either. I'm personally a bar and cafe sort of person, so I found the area quite charming.- Temple Bar is not an enormous tourist trap. It's a tourist trap, yes, but in the same sense that Times Square is. Just like everyday New Yorkers visit 42nd street, real Irish can be found in the district just south of the river, you can get a good shepherd's pie and there is plenty of cultural flavor in the area. Make sure you stop by at least once during your stay.
- Phoenix park is the largest city park in all of Europe. Just Northwest of the hailed Temple Bar, you can walk around Phoenix for an hour and barely scrape the surface of the massive plot. Much of the perfectly tailored grass is on limits, so you can feel free to walk awry from the winding paths, take your shoes off and really absorb the fertilizer into your bare feet. Contrast this to the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, where hundreds of locals pull up chairs to the edge of the path just to watch the grass silently sit there undisturbed.
- Skyscrapers are nonexistent downtown. In fact, the tallest series of buildings around town happen to be in the network of Guinness buildings. Which leads us to:
- Guinness sponsors everything. In addition to their near omnipresence in every pub (and hence on every corner in the city,) the beer company also has independent retail stores where you can buy branded underwear and sheets, sponsors athletic teams and appears to be the impetus behind 9 out of 10 business deals in the country.
- Shamrocks, Leprechauns and pots of gold are all out. We think that Guinness bought the patent on each of these ideas and swallowed them into the beer empire.
- It's going to rain. Really. They don't call it the Emerald Isle because it's known for arid plains and rolling deserts. It rains here like the heavens just broke up with their long term girlfriend. A good rule of thumb is to take any precipitation forecast you saw on the news and multiply it by four.
- Riverdance is ridiculous. But it does happen. And people eat it up like pigeons fighting for popcorn. Several of the more touristy hotels even offer the spectacle nightly, where hundreds of tourists amass during the evening hours to watch a few poor sots dance their hearts out and spin in circles. If you're really interested in finding something of this sort in Dublin, just follow the mess of fanny packs at around 9PM and you'll inevitably reach a venue.
Filed under: Arts and Culture, Europe, Ireland
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
ScottG. Nov 12th 2008 12:21PM
Thanks for the good article. Its the first one I've read beginning to end in awhile. :)
Emland Nov 12th 2008 3:07PM
My daughter and I are both step dancers and I hope to visit Dublin one day - hopefully when she qualifies for World's.
I've got the hair and complexion to pass as Irish (traced my dad's people back to County Antrim mid 1800s) but I can't stomach Guiness. Will I get run out of town?
JC Skinner Nov 12th 2008 6:47PM
I appreciate you're trying to be lighthearted but this is a pretty poor travel piece about Dublin.
The factual errors in such a short piece are myriad - just because the Guinness store sells sweatshirts doesn't mean they sponsor athletics teams (they don't), and the docklands part of town features numerous buildings significantly taller than the Guinness brewery (though the underlying principle of building out not up does indeed apply in Dublin.)
I suppose what irks me most is the failure to engage with Dublin on any meaningful level. It sounds like the author got no further than Temple Bar (where Irish people go to work, or transit through en route somewhere else, never to socialise - it is a dedicated, overpriced tourist trap).
Tourist hotels - one or two within five minutes of Temple Bar - may indeed present Irish dancing shows for tourists. Compare that schmaltzy kitsch with the myriad of genuine Irish traditional music sessions going on all over town every night, and you might find that you missed the real indigenous culture and simply sampled the tourist fare.
Yes, Phoenix Park is a fantastic oasis. But there is so much more to Dublin than the park, the Guinness Storehouse and Temple Bar.
I'd encourage the author to travel a bit more widely than five minutes walk from the river if he wants to experience a very real, very vivid cultural life that genuine Dubliners enjoy next time.
And what is the obsession with Shepherd's pie about, anyway? That's an English dish, rarely seen on Irish menus. Hardly typical of Dublin dining, which is as top-end as any, as a visit to Guibauld's, L'Guelton, Chapter One, Lockes, etc, would reveal.
I give this article 3/10. Next time, the lazy author should explore the town a bit better.
wandermom Nov 12th 2008 7:51PM
Good list!
Suggestion: live like a local and do a pub crawl in downtown Dublin. It doesn't take much effort and can help with keeping upright.
Also, take the bus in from the airport. The stretch of road from the airport to downtown has some of the worst traffic in the city. Buses run regularly from just outside arrivals.
For things to do with children (and even an accommodation suggestion), try this.
killbotkondo Nov 12th 2008 7:19PM
Grant, please give up on travel writing. You seriously suck at it. As JC mentioned above, you did not even scratch the surface of what Dublin has to offer. And shepherds pie ??? WTF ??? It's IRELAND, not ENGLAND. Ugh.
DJ Nov 13th 2008 1:04AM
Ireland is way over- rated.
Randi Nov 16th 2008 9:58PM
I found Dublin refreshing after the fashion parade and pout lips of Paris. Irish humor often at the expense of one's self is designed to make the worst, not so bad.
I would agree, there Temple Bar is mostly where people work, that being said the University literary tour, and the literary pub tour are both wonderful--especially for those who have never witnessed a good performance of Joyce done in the local vernacular. Reading a bit of Joyce and the other Irish writers of note would help would be travelers immensely to get on the right page.
One thing no travel journal can detail with depth is Irish humor and the Irish soul, it must be experienced in all of it's kindness and music in order to fully begin to understand the grievances this country has faced under famine and the dictatorship of the English crown. Its current incarnation is the determination by Irish citizens to help political prisoners the world over.
A visit to the old jail outside of Dublin is an eye-opening experience similar to Mandela's cell in South Africa. Not only are the cells incredibly small and overcrowded and the food dear, but one was forced to march in circles in silent in the yard, yet still starving families committed crimes to enter.
On that note, I found tears come to my eyes in an unlikely place, the Irish have special immigration status, due to the volume of Irish citizens who leave her shores for employment elsewhere (50% currently.) Ireland is the only nation where the U.S. processes entry before you leave Ireland, inside immigration is a tribute to all those who have had to leave the Emerald shores, originally via the Custom House with her weeping lady of charity on top who watched as the ships departed of Irish blood.
Still the Irish depart, I watched an immigration officer round a lad with questions as to whether or not he had a past girlfriend in the U.S. and the nature of their current relationship before allowing him to board, I found the questioning invasive and in bad taste.
Most shocking, due to E.U. status is the lack of actual Irish in Dublin at all, most Irish living further out. The city seems to have become a part of Eastern Europe for the number of Polish workers and signs, an Irish salary to low for the droves of young people off for riches. Do Irish still live in Ireland, yes, and programming jobs are coming, but the majority of the young live elsewhere in the musical countries of the global economy. Those wishing for a purely Irish experience may be disheartened as they struggle to speak Polish to buy a tomato.
All said in done, Ireland is an amazing place, it's history, much of it a torrent, it's music, it's language (Irish not English) and it's humor and it's sadness.
As it enters the global market place it shines up this last part, but it can not escape the truth of where did all the people go who once inhabited it's shores, a million empty bodies leave a chilling legacy. Hence the source of the sadness and the drink.
CJK Nov 13th 2008 4:16AM
For a man who claims to have gone on a pub crawl in Dublin you didn't mention many pubs.
You are not going to find the high brow or the wealth of museums in Dublin that you will in the heavy hitters. Youmust bear in mind that this is a country where culture was exported though the people and artifacts through the british empire.
Spend a morning shopping on Grafton Street then when you get to the top of the street turn left. The first bar you meet will be in the Shelboure hotel. An historic spot, carry on down the street into O'Donoghue's for some traditional irish music and if you're hungry a toasted sandwich. You can pub crawl your way to Lansdowne Road and in doing so sample a range of some of the finest pubs in the world. By me reckoning there from The Shelbourne to the stadium there are 12 pubs, each one of them worth having a pint in with no pressure to drink the "black stuff" in any of them.
So the next time you decide to write a lazy piece about a city at least engage a local in conversation while in one of the pubs and if your lucky he'll be some struggling writer who might even pen the article for you.
And if you want some drunken culture on the way on this route you will never be more than five minutes walk from the government buildings, national library, national art museum, merrion and fitzwilliam squares, you'll also get to sit beside patrick cavanagh on a bench by the canal before arriving at the oldest international rugby ground in the world.