First Days in Ireland

I spent the first day in Dublin. This was a pretty building I passed on the way to Dublin castle.

 

 Dublin castle was built in the 13th century with many later modifications, but still shows the Norman style it was based on.

 

 

 

I just walked around the grounds and the gardens.

 

The gardens in back are pretty, but full of all the traditional annual plants that you see everwhere.

 

This is a glass snail in the garden.

 

I spent the day walking round.

 

In the evening the light was pretty.

I especially like what it did to this James Joyce statue.

 

 

IT looks more like this during the day.

 

The next day on August 22, I went on a tour to the cliffs of Moher.  The bus drove by this hospital.

 

Our first stop was at Kilmacduagh Monastery. This was a really cool set of monastic buildings established by St. Colman in the 7th century.  It is near a town called Gort.



It had lovely ruins, and Celtic grave stones, and a 12th-century round tower.  
 


The monastery was destroyed by William de Burgh in the 13th century.
 
  

 

 

After the monastery we then headed over toward the cliffs of Moher.  Onthe way we passed the blooming heath.  I am fascinated by heather and it makes the countryside beautifully colorful.



Our guide was a good story teller, so he entertained us on the way to the cliffs by telling us about Irish history and culture. He also showed us piles of peat and thatched roof houses.  Of course I couldn't get a very good shot, because of the rain, but here is a fuzzy shot.

 

 Below is a house I saw later.

Unfortunately we had total fog, so when we got to the cliffs it was pretty difficult to see much more than the outline.  There was a museum that told about the history and there wre lots of pictures like the one below.

 

Here is what I actually saw.

 

We hung out a bit, but vivibility didn't get any better, so pretty soon we boarded the bus again. Passing fields we could see livestock and sheep.

 

Our next stop was the Burren, where there is a series of unusually shaped karst rocks and across the water was views of the Aran Islands and Twelve Bens mountain range. 

 

Photos really don't do these rocks justice.

 

 

 

We boarded the bus and watched the landscape pass by on the way to Galway.

 

 

 We also passed by Dunguaire Castle, as well as the villages of Kinvara, Ballyvaughan, and Kilfenora.  

 

And of course also passed by more sheep.

 

 

Our guide told this that this was the smallest castle int he world and that a Leprachaun lived there. (It is about 7 feet tall.

 Here was a building we passed on the way to Galway.

Galway is famous for these black fishing boats called hookers.There is also an ale named after these boats and of course when we were let out to explore the city, we were told to go enjoy a Galway hooker.

 

I di find some things to buy in Galway, because I wanted to buy aran goods since I was in the land of the Aran.  Here are some painted buildings in Galway.

 

On the floor above there is this woman painted in the window, that I just really took a shine to.

I also saw a leprachaun  in Galway!

Flight to Ireland

On August 20th I boarded a plane in Minneapolis and headed off to Europe.  I had a stop over in Boston, which I thought was kind of exciting.  Left again at night and caught this image as we departed.

 

I love taking pictures out of airplane windows.  There is something so trippy and unreal about what you see.

 Here is Ireland when we were close to arrival.

 

On my way into town I saw these bicycles hanging up and thought they looked kind of cool.

Headed towards my room I saw these familiar people.

Here is a close up.

 

I stayed at Trinity College. Here is a view of the campus. This is the man that eventually let women into the College. He said he would do it over his dead body, and he died just before convocation in the year that he finally was forced to let women in!

There is a rumor that if you are under the bell tower when it rings, that you won't graduate from Trinity, so students don't like to walk under there just in case.

I took a tour of Trinity campus. They have student guides who wear the traditional gowns (but they fade in the son, so instead of being black they are brown.)

This is the main square of the campus.

At night when the tourists leave you can actually get a nice shot of the campus.

 

Of course I had to go see the book of Kells. and the Long Room in the library.

The Long Room is very impressive. (Unfortunately more impressive than the page I got to see in the Book of Kells (which was mostly just writing and some weird angel-like creature.)

They catalogue the books by size (because it makes the shelves more stable tohave the big books at the bottom.

This is one of the oldest harps of Ireland.

This is hte famous Molly Malone statue in the center of town.

And finally this is my room at Trinity College; small but all that I needed for my time in Dublin.

Visitors in the Drain Field

New Exhibit

Unfortunately the snow storm cancelled our opening, but I have been working with Extending the Link and a documentary on immigrants and their changing definition of home.  The documentary called Bayt Jadeed compares the experiences of Somali immigrants to Minnesota with the experiences of Syrian migrants in Germany.  You can see the trailer here.

In the meantime I thought I would post some images of our exhibit. I drew the larger pencil images and Zoe Huot-link did the smaller ink drawings.

 

We had some problems with the adhesive, but eventually came up with a solution.  Zoe's images concentrate on the many peopole interviewed for the documentary.  My images focus on the experiences of the Syrian migrants who travelled to Germany and in particular Berlin.  The images are composites of press reports and photos that I took in 2015 and again in December of 2018.



My images show such experiences as escaping from a war zone, crossing large expanses of land and sea, leaving over-crowded boats,  the endless waiting as migrants got stuck at borders, and experiences in the new home.  I'm looking forward to the opening! ;-)