A Walking Tour and Cliff Walk

While we were trying to plan out our post-relatives week, we realized that Monday, June 16th was Bloomsday.  Don't feel bad, I had never heard of it either.  But it has great significance when you're husband is James Joyce Gioia, named after the famous Irish author.  Bloomsday is in reference to the main character, Leopold Bloom, in the Joyce novel Ulysses.  The events of the very long novel (that Jim has attempted to read several times beginning in high school, but has never gotten past page 37) all take place on June 16th, 1904.  So each year, on that day, fans of Joyce celebrate by walking through the scenes of the novel.  We decided we must head in to Dublin to experience this...and maybe get inspired to actually read the book.

 We have a bus stop in across the street from the house that heads straight in to city centre, however it drove right past us, ignoring us standing there.  We carried our wounded feelings into the cafe, and waited for the next bus 20 minutes later, which did stop for us, but I was holding on to the bus stop sign to make it as obvious as possible.  Another beautiful day here, and we walked around a bit and had lunch before heading to the James Joyce Centre for some readings and a walking tour.

Here is Jim in Temple Bar, swearing to never return
to a pub crawl after his 2010 adventure here

The James Joyce Centre is located on N. Great George's Street just half a block from Belvedere College which Joyce attended. Much of the novel is autobiographical and Bloom's journey follows a path and includes locations very meaningful to Joyce  Inside were several exhibits, including a photography exhibit: Lee Miller (1907-1977) in James Joyce's Dublin.  Sixty black and white photos of sites from James Joyce's life as well as locations that figured in Ulysses.

In the Center, there were several reading from the book by actors from a troupe in Boston. 

This lady was my favorite.  

We then embarked on our walking tour through Dublin, stopping at various sites that figured in to Joyce's life and/or Ulysses.  A number of people attending were in period piece costumes.

Here is the statue of James Joyce, looking off to the post office, the site of the Easter uprising.

This is also the statue that my James Joyce hung on to on the way back to our hotel, post pub-crawl, in 2010.

Our tour guide was a literature professor from Trinity College here in Dublin, although he was from Los Angeles and taught at UCLA prior to coming to Dublin 10 years ago.  I have never read any Joyce, but enjoyed the play "The Dead" which was from his book The Dubliners (which is one of Alex's favorite books).  Really appreciated his readings as we stopped at each site, as well as his explanations about meaning, style of writing, political relevance.  

This is St. George's Cathedral (Protestant) - which was near the character Leopold Bloom's house.  But it is now an office building - which our tour guide said has been "to let" as long as he has been in Dublin.  I took the photo to highlight just what a beautiful day it was.

After the tour we went through the Garden of Rememberance

for those who lost their lives in the rebellion

We had heard a lot about how great the hiking is here in Ireland, and got many suggestions from the home owners as well as some of Jim's cousins.  So today (Tuesday) we headed off to our first "hill walk" which is what they call it here.  It was predicted to be another great weather day, so we headed off to the coast - about a 20 minute drive - to Bray.  It reminded us so much of the Marina Green in San Francisco!  

We walked along the beach path heading to the "Cliff Walk" trail which you can see below, heading up the hill after the cluster of buildings.

Once the trail begins, it is a 6km walk on a trail that ends in the next coastal town, Greystones.

Jim at the start of the trail, looking back to Bray

The trail was originally built for the workers building the train tracks that connected this area with Dublin.  

I cannot help myself from sharing the photos we took while walking, so you can imagine taking the walk with us...

Towards the end of the trail, Greystone off in the distance

We arrived at Greystones, headed in to the charming 4 or 5 block main street and had lunch.  

The nice thing about this walk, particularly since Jim injured his heel prior to the vacation, was that were able to take the DART train back to Bray.

Today the tortoise became very active, quickly (for a tortoise) going around the garden.  Even came up fairly close to me.  Don't know if he/she is disoriented as we are with the long days.  Dawn is around 4 a.m., dusk around 11 p.m.  We haven't had any rain since the brief showers the first few days, so I watered the potted plants here.  At dinner last night, the waitress asked where we were from and commented that we brought the sunny California weather with us.  Hopefully it will stay nice like this - certainly makes it easier for us to get around.

More of Dublin and some day-trips over the next week, so keep checking in!