May 2013 -- Ireland
I took a RyanAir flight to Dublin for a long weekend of literature and exploring. It's a delightful city, self-aware and replete with the insubstantial but unmistakable aura of sub-dermal cultural liveliness. My first destination was Trinity College, one of the world's great institutions of higher education. Known primarily for its writers (Beckett, Stoker, Swift, Wilde, etc), it also educated a number of great physicists (Stokes, Hamilton, Werner Israel). The campus has a superb cricket pitch, and a delightful free science gallery, which was hosting an exhibition on probability.
I also took part in the Literary Pub Crawl, of which the former part is particularly well done, complete with scenes and information from the hosts, and the latter being as you'd expect. The Mecca of my visit was the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which was established during the WWII era to host scientists fleeing Hitler and to jump-start Ireland's scientific program. The first hire, Erwin Schrödinger, called him time there the happiest of his life, and was very fond of Dublin.
I took a day trip to Belfast for a bit of a wander around that city. It feels very much a part of Britain but, although I had arrived during a sort of festival, I still found the place a bit flat and deflating. I suppose my travels have made me suppose that cities are where they are for good reason -- Vancouver has her mountains, Paris her Seine, and Naples her ports -- but Belfast's river is tiny, and the port that launched the Titanic hardly seems to be on anyone's mind these days.
I was delighted with the Irish people I met. I've visited a lot of places with advertised reputations for hospitality, but I none matched the smiles, cheer, and friendliness of the Irish people I met. Lastly, a glimpse of how I travel. This knapsack is my only luggage: spare clothes at the bottom, books at the top.
