Bono, Guiness, Yeats, Pearse and... Phil Collins?

DAY 3
Yesterday was full, but most of it was spent touring around, so I will put that in list form as well. Feel free to ask questions about anything in here and I will try my best to reply quickly!

Our tour was a “hop on hop off” 24 ticket around the city. We saw:
- Christchurch: one of 2 huge cathedrals in the city (this one was built originally
within the city walls) and it is actually built on both sides of a street with an arch
over the road.
- St. Patrick’s Cathedral: the other cathedral (originally outside the city limits)
- Irish Writer’s Museum: apparently all Irish writers are/were controversial & got
censored; maybe you can’t be good without a censor or two?
- GPO (General Post Office): where the Easter Uprising of 1916 was let by Patrick
Pearse
- Trinity College: which was a bust because the charged $$ to see the book of Kells
and I refused… sigh

Other things we learned on this tour include:
- “craic” = “fun”
- a cop is called a “garda”
- more than one cop = “gardai”
- a female cop was called “ban garda” (‘ban’ = woman) until the feminist movement
removed the word “ban” because (according to the tour guide), the female cops
didn’t want to be seen as women – hah!
- which hotel Bono owns and where U2 stays when they visit
- that the Guinness founder and his wife had 21 kids
- that there is a St named Vincent de Paul ☺

Keep in mind that the entire day was distorted by having a Phil Collins song running over & over in my head! SO wrong.

LATER THAT DAY:
Ky & I met Dana again and she brought her friend from college, Laura, with her. We all went to a pub for supper (my creepy bone issue nearly caused a scene, but Dana is AWESOME and cut the meat off the bone for me – how cool is that??? – I’ll know to ask next time) and then we went to the Abbey theatre. This theatre was founded by W B Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory (things I learned in the Writers’ Museum) and we watched a play called “The Big House” about an English family whose kids were born & raised in Ireland and have a bit of an identity crisis because they are accepted by neither the Irish nor the English. I laughed; I cried. Very moving! Caucasian Chalk Circle plays next month – I don’t know if I will get here for that or not, but I sure hope so!