Ireland - Day One

Glasnevin Cemetery was utterly fantastic!! I grabbed the #40 bus there and got to sit up top in the front row. I had read that the tour was free, but became a bit concerned when I saw that there would be an 8 euro charge. I was assured that today it would be free. Woosh! Such a feeling of relief.

Prior to the tour, I used the bathroom, but faced a quandary afterwards when I soaped up my hands, turned on the water, and nothing came out of the faucets! Walking into the flower shop with soapy hands, the clerk was sympathetic but couldn't do anything. She explained the waterworks had just flooded and they had to shut the water off. I searched for, and found, a huge puddle in the cemetery to dip my hands in to finish washing up. I must've looked silly, but desperate acts call for desperate measures.. This was a dire situation!

There were only a few of us for the tour, our guide looked like what you would expect a person of history to look like - a bit disheveled but a fountain of knowledge. He showed us around and gave us a run down of the cemetery's beginnings and many of the famous people buried there. We were brought into the tomb of Daniel O'Connell and also shown the tiny room which contains the resting area of his descendants. The thing is, they aren't entombed. Instead, their coffins are stacked on top of each other creating an unsettling sight. This was a bit too freaky for us, especially since we were only a few feet from the coffins, and learning right then and there that since most of the older coffins in the cemetery are lead lined, they still contain the diseases of the day. So, say for instance, a coffin breaks and the person inside had perished from cholera, the preserved disease will now enter the air.

Still, it was all too fascinating for words. What was especially cool were the thousands of Celtic crosses throughout the cemetery. Most of them very ornate. Many are in need of repair and in today's dollars, the work needed to restore them would go into the tens of thousands. Some of them into the hundreds of thousands. Politics also plays in important role because of the sectarian groups associated with the many people buried there. You see this in the laying of flowers and in the epitaphs. The military does do a sweep of the cemetery to make sure there is no sectarian vandalism. Glasnevin doesn't get funding from the government for upkeep, which explains the dire state of some of the gravestones. However, some of the graves are tended to by certain political sectarian groups, but only for their own. Also fascinating was seeing the final resting place of the many who shaped Irish history.

Afterwards, I headed back to the city center and putzed around browsing some of the shops. The exchange rate is still terrible so any shopping sprees are out of the question. I may sashay into Penney's (Primark) for some cheap new threads though. I headed to the Epicurean Food Hall, which is a big food court type place. I had read about The Pie Kitchen and was interested in ordering the root vegetable and cheddar pie. It turned out to be delicious, but my taste buds had to get used to food that wasn't laced with some sort of sugar or preservative, like most things are in the US. As satisfied as I was, I couldn't resist ordering the apple crumble dessert. When the counter woman came over with the double cream, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I left stuffed for the entire night. This time, thankfully, the tea was drinkable.