dublin

Dates traveled: November 2-4, 2017

By the time we were in Dublin I was so exhausted from nearly two weeks of flying to new countries and not sleeping in overcrowded hostels that my body was in disbelief that I made it keep moving, so I ended up taking more breaks than I’d like. I easily could’ve spent two more days there without getting bored, but we do what we can with the time and energy we have.

I was shocked at how touristy downtown Dublin was and how far the tourist enclave stretched. Streets of pedestrians going nowhere in the middle of a weekday. For awhile I was convinced no one actually lived in Dublin, just others like me wandering and clogging up the real estate with our fingers always a movement away from a picture.

The first night we went to the Temple Bar, which actually denotes an entire area, and it was lively as hell. People spilled out of bars crowded way fuller than Canadian fire regulations would allow, all with live music.

I think the second bar we went to was ‘the original’ Temple Bar. It reeked of puke. The third or fourth or fifth we found fiddles, which was much to Justin’s liking, imbuing the belief that Ireland was still like what we thought it was before we traveled there: a caricature of whatever version of Irish culture permeated as far as Canada.

After we tired of that, we found a quieter bar (still live music) a few blocks away where a chatty guy had a lot of fun with Justin’s camera and who I’m hoping inspired a new series ‘drunk locals take photos of drunk tourists’. It was about a block from the Abbey Theatre, which we stumbled across and was my first realization that we really were in Dublin and these famous things just stood there alone on an evening with no one necessarily around to prove their celebrity, aside from my own background knowledge.

I managed to do a shorter version of my Big Walk on the second day. The main thread of the city is the river Liffey (also the name of a bar we drank at in Stockholm, fun fact), which the downtown is built around. The traffic lights are timed to give much more time to cars than pedestrians, which contributed to the sidewalk congestion, though even the pedestrian-only areas were hard to navigate.

The whole thing reminded me of the mall in early high school on Friday nights.

There were a few really nice parks that had the biggest gulls I’ve ever seen. I spent some time trying to catch my breath in St. Stephen’s Green, sipping some Insomnia coffee, teasing my ironic need for more coffee to function because I couldn’t fall asleep.

I made my way to the port, but it seemed completely industrial and I couldn’t find any boardwalks or anywhere to facilitate exploring. I guess it’s a functioning port, not one that exists for tourists, though with the amount of construction that was nearby I’d bet that’s going to change.

Near the port it seemed like an entire neighbourhood was being created – several blocks of large-scale construction, with one tiny two-storey apartment building in the middle with a banner asking to help save their family homes and talk to local councillors. At the far end of the construction some hi-rise condos were already completed.

We went to the Guinness brewery and I was again astounded by the enormity of it all. The top floor was a circular bar with a panoramic view of the city. There must have been thousands of people in the building when we were there. I’m happy to report they no longer use fish bladders in their brewing.

On the last night we walked to a neighbourhood a little outside the downtown that came up when I googled ‘hipster neighbourhood Dublin’. This time it was smaller than I expected, with only a few bars, but we found one with food, and after figuring out how to order, we were approached by a group of first-year residents from the nearby hospital wanting to share our table so they could play pub trivia. We ended up making a team together and won first place (the theme was America, lucky for us), so we got free drinks and asked them too many questions until it became obvious they wanted to have their own conversations and the men that showed up after wanted to talk to the girls and didn’t appreciate the appearance of competition.

Before we sullied away they confirmed what we suspected – rents were insane. The woman sitting beside me rented a room in a six-bedroom house because no one could afford to live on their own.

I couldn’t help feeling guilty most the time I was there. With so much demand for short-term rentals downtown from all the visitors, residents can’t afford to live in the area, so they’re pushed out. There are economic benefits to tourism – jobs, an influx of money – but there is also a premium on space, and as a tourist, I was obviously contributing to this issue. I don’t know what the answers are but I do feel a bit dirty about the whole thing, and not just because I was on my last day of clean underwear.

Aside from my own burning interest in gentrification and housing prices, there were symbols of sadness dotted throughout the city: reminders of famine, war, oppression. And symbols of hope, too, with perhaps a hat-tip to Bono.

I think Dublin is a fun city with lots going on, but it didn’t exactly stand out to me either. It has its quirks, and I particularly enjoyed hearing the accents. There are some benefits to similarities among international cities (they become easier to navigate, for example), but I’m also a little dismayed that the more I travel to urban centres, the more it seems like everywhere’s becoming the same.