Dublin

I’ve been busy the last couple days so I guess I have a little catching up to do. I guess I’ll start with today first. This morning I went to see the Book of Kells in the library of Trinity College. It’s an ancient manuscript of the 4 gospels of the bible, written in ancient Latin. There was about a half-hour wait to get in and they charge 8 euros to see it. After all that they won’t even let you take pictures of it. I tried and a short old man ran up out of nowhere to stop me before I could get a shot off. I think he might of been a ninja because I looked all around before I tried to do it. After that excursion I headed over to the National Gallery a few blocks away. It’s the largest gallery in Ireland, but still relatively small compared to the National Gallery in London. One thing that was really cool was that they have a whole exhibit devoted to Jack B. Yeats, probably one of the most famous artists to come out of Ireland. His works are similar to a lot of Monets I’ve seen where you can only faintly make out a picture and you have to use your imagination for the rest. I really liked his works.

After wandering around the museum for a couple hours, I went to the National Library next door. They have a Genealogical Department to help people trace their families from Ireland. When I inquired about the Welch family from the mid-1600’s, the man told me they only really have data from about 1800 on. So I decided to look through the books anyway, and found a Welsh family, which is a variation on the Walsh family. Now Walsh was a name given to many unconnected families and there are Walshs from basically every county in Ireland, not to mention that it’s the 4th  most common surname in Ireland. This really didn’t solve anything for me, but the book said that the Welsh variation is used in Munster and Connacht near Wexford and it is also particularly strong in Galway, Cork, Wexford, Waterford, and Kilkenny (which names most of the biggerr cities in Ireland).

I still have a lot of pics from the walking tour I did last Friday and also from the Guinness Brewery tour, but I’ll put those in a separate post.