Saturday evening Eric, Marco, Nick, Leo, Martin and me went to a pub around the corner to watch the football game (England vs. Italy) in a pub. The pub itself was quite nice and they equipped every wall with at least one tv. With adding all of them the number would be around 15 screens where the game was shown at. We expected the pub to be more full but there we’re only a few groups of people with us. They weren’t really happy that England lost but the atmosphere was okay at all. We played a bit of billiard and table soccer and after a few funny hours we went back to our apartments. The sunday was mostly eventless. Leo and me walked a bit through the botanic park which is really nice and always a place where alot and all kinds of people are around. Since there are only to more weeks to go and I want to visit the distillery of Bushmills at least once Martin and me decided to go there next weekend too. It requires a bit of travelling but I think it’s worth the effort.
Tag: 17. Juni 2014
Phoenix From The… Poo?
Even though I drank 2 full glasses of water after coming home from the BBQ on Friday, I woke up with a killer headache on Saturday. I believe that the Heineken is probably to blame for that because Carlsberg never gave me this tingly let-me-park-ma-chainsaw-in-your-head sensation. There’s nothing that kills a killer headache better than a nice long walk so I got up, had breakfast and went to Tesco to pick up a bottle of water and a few bananas and then made my way down towards Phoenix Park and the Dublin Zoo.
George had already made plans with his host family so I went on my own. I walked down towards the intersection where I used to meet George in our first week here and kept walking towards city center.
I walked along the River Liffey, my jacket tucked away in my backpack because it was quite warm despite the thick carpet of clouds covering the sun. The Liffey is an interesting River to watch because depending on the time and therefore the tide, you can see it flow towards the country, towards the sea or not at all.
The Dublin Zoo is pretty small and there aren’t many animals in it which I was kind of happy about. I hope the 12.80€ that I paid for my student ticket, are being used to make the animals that are “living” in the Zoo feel better. I won’t include any pictures of lions or tigers because for one, I only have one picture showing a lion and for another, I think those animals would be better off not being imprisoned here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not starting a crusade but seeing the Zoo as what it was and knowing how we treat animals, captive or free, I’m actually ashamed I went there. What good is it to keep an animal behind bars for “preservation” purposes? It actually only frees everybody else up to destroy the natural habitats of those creatures instead of preserving them!
Anyway, I walked through the whole Zoo in about 2 hours and I was really taking my time because my feet already hurt and because I had nothing else to do with my day. I watched screaming children of ignorant parents bang against the windows of the enclosures or yell at the gorillas to “wake up” because the animals weren’t doing “anything fun”. Seeing not only the big animals of the African Plains but also the apes like gorillas or orangutans sit in their artificial environments, minding their own business, I couldn’t help but think of the The Planet of the Apes movies and especially the last one that showed just how much our distant relatives actually understand of their situation. I’m probably getting a bit off topic here… sorry about that.
“The forest drips and glows with green,
The tree-frog croaks his far-off song.
His voice is stillness, moss and rain
drunk from the forest ages long.
We cannot understand that call
unless we move into his dream,
where all is one and one is all
and frog and python are the same.
We with our quick dividing eyes
Measure, distinguish and are gone,
The forest burns, the tree-frog dies,
yet one is all and all are one.”
Rainforest, Judith Wright
I walked home through Phoenix Park again but this time I walked on the grass because I thought I might as well put my body down there for a nap or something. That idea went as fast as it came when I discovered that there was so much deer poo in the park that it was actually astonishing that the grass still looked green and not blackish-brown. In light of this new discovery, I just kept on walking home.
I had burger and French fries for dinner and talked to Anne and the new housemates, 2 girls from Austria. They don’t know that I’m German and I’m still waiting for a good opportunity to surprise them with a German sentence.
I went to bed, thinking that on Sunday I would definitely not do anything. Well, things just never turn out the way you expect them to.
Saturday
On Saturday I went to the Ulster museum for a lecture I’ve had registered for. It was about cartography in the past times, and was held by a doctor who presented his own scientific work. He and one of his students created a map where Ireland was displayed with a grid overlay on it and other different informations in unique representations. The overlay was an abstract way to show the deviation between todays exact data and the old map they took as base. He explained different philisophical meanings of maps and talked about how (with trigonometry and walking down the landscape) they were created. The earliest dated maps displayed Ireland in the 17th century and before that it is even today totally unknown how the people created them (but still they existed). In the last part of the lecture he explained how the old maps are being digitalized and reviewed. All in all it was very interesting and I would like to hear more about the topic. After that I took a quick stroll through the museum, but since it’s very big and I wanted to go to city center to exchange some euros to pounds I only was able to visit 2 sections of it. I planned a more extensive visit for next weekend and I will keep you updated. After leaving the musuem I walked down to the city center and found a possbility to exchange money in the tourist information. On my way back home I went to a bookshop in the Botanic Avenue and spend a few bucks in it. It was specialized in crime novels and is called NO Alibis. It’s just a small shop but it was well frequented and the other costumers had a talk with the salespersons there. When I left it they offered me a few postcards for free and I took them. It was a nice Saturday not at last because of the nice weather and I hope the last weekend will be that nice too.