Our Journey Continues

The beaty museum was pretty cool. It had a lot of ancient scriptures and the like in it. I found the Buddhist stuff particularly interesting, though they had a wide variety of all of all religions except Judaism because apparently it was fairly difficult for the millionare who donated them to Ireland to collect.

The Book of Kells is an ancient illustrated representation of the gospels which is often thought of the epitome of Irish Celtic art, and also as the paragon of medieval art. It certainly is impressive. I think the thing the thing that impressed me the most was the fact that the Lapulis Lazuli was imported from a single mine all the way from Afghanistan. The idea that these extensive trade networks back then is pretty amazing.

Iron Man was good. The plot was a bit thin, but it was still enjoyable. It had a healthy amount of explosions. There were a few fascinating things about seeing a movie in Ireland. One, you can buy beer and spirits at the movie theater and drink it there. Not amazingly surprising. However, what was interesting was the fact that their movie seats are assigned, just like our seat whilst going to a play was assigned. There were no 'pre movie slides'. There were also, so far as I saw, no ads for Irish movies before Iron Man, and only a small handful in the entire theater. They were almost all American movies.

Today we spent most of the day in the Irish National Museum. They had an impressive display of all kinds of Irish historical artifacts, including ancient ones, viking ones, and of course Celtic. The most impressive items on display are four virtually perfectly preserved partial human corpses that were found in a bog. You could even see the fingerprints on the skin or the hair. Indeed, with two of the four, the hair was better preserved better than some items. They also had a rather large celtic dug out canoe.