Monday, August 8
Traveling while demented will present its own peculiar problems, to be documented in the years to come. We have a storage locker where important papers are less likely to burn in the event of a wildfire, and moments before we left, I managed to lose the padlock key in the course of less than a minute. I felt the key in my pocket, walked up the stairs to the car, and when I got there, the key was missing. At least that’s what I remember doing. A search has turned up nothing. The memory is so well-defined, and challenged so soon afterwards, that my best hypothesis is that aliens entered my mind and caused me to place the key someplace intentionally between the kitchen and the car, and then erased the memory.
In the midst of all the fuss, Dave forgot to give the Tesla key to Brian, who is keeping the car for us while we are gone.
The flight from San Francisco to Dublin was uneventful. It was an ordinary amount late, and flew an ordinary route slightly south of a great circle, surfing the jet stream, dodging a bank of thunderstorms at the corner of Manitoba, Ontario, and Hudson Bay. Didn’t get dark enough to see northern lights, if there were any.
Greenland is still monochromatic.
Tuesday, August 9
We arrived early in Dublin, where we sat on the taxiway thinking about things while someone located a gate. Doesn’t pay to arrive early. The luggage had indeed traveled on the same flight — Dave decided to check his at the last minute since it was free, and there may never again be an opportunity to experience that. We took the 700 bus to Sussex to the cheapest lodging in town, which is within 30 miles of Temple Bar and doesn’t have reviews on Tripadvisor or airbnb describing a recent infestation of rats with active cases of brucellosis and yaws.
Our room has a view.
Our friend Samuel, whom we will miss this time in Dublin as he is vacationing in Southeast Asia, left us some suggestions for eating and entertainment. His favorite restaurants are all closed on Tuesday, and his favorite theater has a website that doesn’t work in at least three ways (“+” not accepted in phone number field, “continue” button not visible, credit card not accepted after all that) (I see these errors in other on line commerce sites; why do they all copy each other’s flawed code?)
We found on our own a really nice tasting menu at a restaurant called “Delahunt”, whose food and staff are delightful and absolutely deserve your business. Dave spent the meal trying to navigate the theater website and finally wrote an email, to which the management immediately responded saying the Best Available Seats will be waiting for us at Will Call.
Wednesday, August 10
The play, Translations, was not what I expected. I thought it would be about Indian school scandals, except in Ireland, based on the description. Instead, it was one of those Tom Stoppard pieces about words. Fair enough, it’s Ireland. I read the Wikipedia entry during intermission and Dave bought the script for ten euros. Turns out I had surmised most of it. It will be nice for the next decade or so, to be able to say that the most recent theater production I went to was at the Abbey, in Dublin.
Dinner was at the Winding Stair, which we have been to before. Our waitress was less charming than I remember their waiters being in the past. The people seated next to us were two rows in front of us at the theater. I bet half the people with 5-5:30 reservations were there, or other theaters. I think the demographic is parents dropping their kids off at college. Might account for both venues.
The modern art museum, which we went to in the afternoon, was a bit disappointing. Lots of artybollocks and not much skill. ONE HAD HOPED, that the presence of petabytes of collage fodder and light years of Markov chains with which to animate characters, would give unskilled but imaginative artists a leg up in making their ideas known to the public. And it has! Reddit, Tiktok, YouTube. Only the museums haven’t caught on yet.