The interesting cheap fare Ray found to get to Dublin did so via Lisbon and London. Getting to Dublin was via train to Wales, and a ferry from there.
Thursday, March 16 – Friday, March 17
We returned to SFO and boarded a TAP flight to Lisbon, leaving around 6pm and arriving at 11:30am the next day. We took an Uber to our “airport hotel” about 2km away. After a nap to supplement what little sleep we got on the 11-hour flight, we took another Uber to the Rua Agusta Arch, and walked up the hill slowly, looking out at all the little view spots, until arriving at a restaurant at which I think we were very lucky to get a reservation on a Friday.
I didn’t realize it was St. Patrick’s Day until a clown dressed as a leprechaun danced down the street.
Plano was on Eater’s list of “essential” restaurants in Lisbon. They had a comparatively inexpensive 6-course tasting menu, and we split a wine pairing. It was all very creative and delicious. It was in a building which had been a cistern, and had an arched brick ceiling. Our waitress had a tattoo of the Mandelbrot Set. This all seems very clever until you think of the implications about job possibilities for mathematicians.
The photos taken of each dish don’t help memory, in a place like that. Nothing looks like fish, or chips. But I did make some notes on my phone:
- Bread and cheese and olive oil and ham and olives three kinds and bubbly wine
- Crusty ball with vegetables inside
- Pork, bread, and pickles
- Tuna tartare in purée with oil and sweet potato crackers and candied peanuts
- Grilled grouper pickle and carrot and bone foam over I forget
- Steak and cauliflower purée and broccoli
- Dessert was basil granita and wine with tiny cubes of fruity things
Our waitress took us to tour the wine cellar afterwards.
Saturday, March 18
The music videos at breakfast at the airport hotel are so mechanical. Even for chatGPT, they feel phoned in.
We returned to the airport and continued to Heathrow, which we’ve avoided for years. (Lisbon was a 22-hour layover on one ticket). Terminal 2 at Heathrow was not unpleasant at all, it looked pretty new. There were electronic gates at passport control, and we got through it and down to the Underground reasonably quickly. We were happy to hear that London Transport accepted contactless credit card transactions, so that there was no need to get tickets or even an Oyster card, like is also now the case in New York. It made getting around much simpler.
We took the tube and a bus to our friend Frank’s house. He lives with his mother in a flat right on the Thames, where she has lived for 50 years. We arrived as Frank was having his birthday party, and it was fun talking with his friends and eating the party food. Everybody spoke over each other but the takeaway line was a story from somebody’s past that ended, “* * brought home a prostitute and there’s blood all over the carpet!”
Frank got us settled in a spare room which was far from spare — it was filled with books by and about C.J. Jung; his mother was active for years in a club discussing his philosophy. Most of the other rooms in the house were filled with books as well.
And never underestimate the cachet of having a harp in the main hall.
Sunday, March 19
We went to the National Gallery to see a small exhibition “The Ugly Duchess”, celebrating Quentin Matsys’ painting, which was inspired by some DaVinci works, and which inspired Tenniel’s illustration of the duchess for Alice In Wonderland. The room was smaller than Frank’s flat, but contained what they said: a drawing by Leonardo, copied by Quinten Massys, and a the matching ugly man. But they didn’t have the Tenniel drawing. I wonder if it survives. A quick look around the Internet does not lead me to the location of any of the original drawings. Copper plates are said to show up at auctions now and then.
We came for that, and stayed for the massive permanent collection of paintings, mostly European. I didn’t know that was where Degas’s Spartan kiddie porn was held, for example, or the Seurat painting of the swimmer with bad posture. Museums are always good for surprises like that.
I had the same thoughts as usual, looking at old paintings: in between Vermeer’s camerawork and Caravaggio’s “You think this is black? THIS is BLACK” (someone should rework that Dolby Vision trailer into art history), every new arrow was added to the Western Canon artist’s quiver between 1500 and 1600, which then stayed stable until about 1850 when photography forced the practitioners to rethink what they were doing and why. There hasn’t been a respite since.
Afterwards, we took a bus up to Stoke Newington to join our ex-coworker friends David and Yuriy and their wives at 19 Numara Bos Cirrik II, David’s favorite Turkish restaurant. Frank was going to bring his mother and his girlfriend to dinner but three Ubers in a row cancelled on him. It would have been a real problem, given her mobility issues; the place was full and densely packed. A young person of indeterminate gender smiled at me and giggled, and their mother gave us all slices of cake from a birthday party that they were having.
Monday, March 20
Frank’s girlfriend Siobhan had arrived, and we met her at breakfast. She is a professional harpist who plays many different variations of harps all over Europe. She had tales of how difficult it is to get a work visa to perform in the US. We went up to the V&A museum and saw a sampling of their collection, and then met our artist friend Oisin in his studio nearby. We’d met him on an eclipse cruise in 2009, and he’s had a successful career since then. Then back to Frank’s for Indian food, delivered.
Oisin said he had a notebook of “orphan sentences” and I think I ought to retitle my similar file with that name.
Tuesday, March 21
After a leisurely morning, we made our way to Euston Station, where we caught a train to Holyhead, Wales. Isn’t this a more civilized way of getting from London to Dublin, than a plane flight? All that English countryside. The train takes three or four hours. We arrived just after dark, in the drizzle, of course. It was a short walk from the station to “Edinburgh Castle”. We turned out to be staying in a room above a pub. I thought by the name Castle, it might be a castle, or a lower tier Anaheim motel with plaster crenellations, but we walked in and the patrons shouted Santa Claus! and a bleached barmaid led us upstairs to a small room. Though the pub was pretty boisterous, especially when karaoke was happening, it was OK because the noise didn’t penetrate up to the room. We found an Indian restaurant which was open. Dal soup, chicken tikka Ceylon, cauliflower, pickles, garlic naan. It was good. We did not have super high hopes for anything being open in a small Welsh port. And so to bed.
Wednesday, March 22
We walked to the nearby Enterprise outlet, and rented a small car. First we drove to the South Stack Lighthouse. The lighthouse was closed, and the day was very windy and a little rainy, so we just peeked at it from up the hill, and turned around. There were some “hut circles”, ruins of an earlier civilization. We drove from there to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which goes on and on about how it’s the longest name in the world but it isn’t, they just left out the spaces. Many scripts left out the spaces in the years before Gutenberg. As one who has lived in Elpueblodenuestraseñoralareinadelosangelesdelríodeporciúncula, I’m only impressed enough to buy a couple of post cards to send to my cousin who sent me a post card from there.
We drove from there to Castle Conwy, a well-preserved fort (except for the roofs) next to a cute little town. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and I didn’t even know it. The harpist had told us to go there, so we went. We spent a couple hours walking around, and then headed back to Anglesey to the Sea Shanty Cafe, where we had a delicious “catch of the day”, John Dory, and smoked haddock fish cakes. Both perfect. The mushroom soup was good too and the wait staff were neither fast nor slow. Only thing I didn’t like was the custard sauce which I think came out of a can.
Their decor is seriously fun nautical kitsch. Bottles of sand from all over the world.
Thursday, March 23
We returned the rental car. Steven wants us to be sure to fill out the review forms as it’s a large part of his evaluation. I hate always being asked to review things, like as not before I’ve even experienced them. I don’t remember if I did. Eventually it was time to board Irish Ferries to Dublin, where we had been invited to a wedding. That was the whole reason for going around the world, to catch a wedding in March and an eclipse four weeks later. The ferry “Ulysses” was not crowded, and the ride was smooth. James Joyce must be as tickled as John Steinbeck to know how much all the people who hated him are profiting from him now. Everything on the boat was Ulysses-themed. If there were references to Scylla or Charybdis, I missed them.