Dublin- Tuesday, August 13, 2013

The other night, Paul and Heather sang the Dubliners song about going to the Zoological Gardens, so we thought that would be a good place to start with the girls.  Julie got us going early so that we could get parking in Phoenix Park, near the Dublin Zoo.  (It was a good thing too, because there were mobs of people later and only a few parking spots for all of them).  The zoo itself is quite nice.  Even though it's a very old zoo and dates back to 1831, it has quite modern facilities and enclosures.  Some of the animals seemed huddling for warmth today, but there were enough out to make it interesting.  The orangutan was just inches from the girls on the other side of the glass.  Five seals came out of their water and up very close to us and a group of children that were near us.  One ostrich had us all laughing by the way he came running over.  We had lunch at the Meerkat Cafe, which has a real meerkat habitat in one wall.   At the end of our stay at the zoo, Emma used her money to adopt a Humbolt penguin.    

At lunch, Emma said she liked leprechauns.  "They're small, and they're cute, but they're also tricky."  In many ways, that summed up what we learned next at the National Leprechaun Museum.  It was a fun experience that we all liked.  We learned the leprechauns in stories used to generally wear brown and have a magic red hat that they could use to disappear.  The leprechauns that we picture today with suits of green and red beards are really based on two American sources that came within a few years of each other in the 1950s- the Walt Disney movie, "Darby O'Gill and the Little People," and the mascot for Lucky Charms cereal.  We heard a popular story about a leprechaun that tricked a man who had caught him into tying a red sock around a tree to mark the spot where the leprechaun's gold was buried.   When the man returned, he found that every tree in the forest was covered with red socks.  Leprechauns are tricky like that.

But the museum was about a lot more just leprechauns.  It could have easily been called, "An Introduction to Irish Storytelling and Folklore."  The museum was set up into several rooms that were meant to suggest a mood and theme from Irish stories, including those about giants and other faerie folk.   The girls sat in enormous chairs in the giant's home before going to view a projected map of Ireland that linked particular places to specific stories.  We sat around a pot of "gold" while we heard the story about the red socks.  Other rooms had us pass under the Giant's Causeway and through the rainbow.   Another room had projected images about the faeries that live underneath Ireland, and the storyteller explained how these faeries were feared and not just the pretty little winged pixies we picture today.  Yet another room was centered around a well where we heard the story of King Lir and how his four children were turned into swans.    Anna said she liked the girl who acted as our storyteller, and it did seem that the people there enjoyed what they were doing.

We then looked for the General Post Office.  In a way this was a bit of a disappointment in terms of a site.  We knew that this was still the active post office for the city, but we had expected more of it as an historic site too.  We knew that the Rising of 1916 had happened here, that the Irish had taken over the Post Office, and the Irish Republic had been proclaimed from the steps here.  We've heard the General Post Office compared to what the Alamo means to Texas.  There was a little bit about that inside, but the museum inside concentrated far more on the history of the Irish post office in general.    (Anna did say that Grandpa Frank would like this part.)  There was a lot on philately, important letters in Irish history (going back to St. Patrick's letters), and the history of the General Post Office Building.  There was a short drama in the back of the exhibit to show what a few of the female employees of the post office observed in 1916, but not much about the rebels themselves.  We did take some photographs outside (though none were allowed in the museum).  

We did a little shopping too. Scott found an Irish music store, and Emma found a bookstore called "Eason's" and Anna bought some tops at a place called, "Only."  We had Burger King in the Jervis shopping centre where we were parked, and decided to head back to the hotel for the evening.