‘London’ Stansted airport is only in London in the same sense that Newark airport is in New York, but it does have one very significant redeeming feature – Stansted is a hub for Ryanair, the airline so cheap I wonder how it stays aloft.  Ryanair’s adverts are very seductive (especially when standing in a Tube station waiting for a train to arrive) and on impulse my girlfriend and I grabbed two tickets for a day trip to Ireland during one of their ‘free’ ticket sales, in which the tickets don't cost anything but the price of taxes and fees -- in this case, about £23 ($35) per person.  Of course the flight left at 0815 which meant leaving London earlier than I care to think about, but hey, it was free and we could start off our visit with a traditional Irish breakfast.  

Aside from a brief moment of panic at the airport, where I realised I had forgotten yet again to remove my Swiss army knife from my keychain (the number of Swiss army knives I've donated to airports around the world makes me want to scream) things went off without a hitch and we were in Dublin at 0930.  All of the signs are bilingual (English/Gaelic) which surprised me because I was under the impression that the number of Irish people who actually speak Gaelic is pretty small.  I didn't hear a word of Gaelic while we were there, which makes me think that Ireland is bilingual in the same way Canada is bilingual -- except for people in one small section of the country, everyone pretty much speaks English.  

I used to wonder why people at home talked about Ireland as if it was a backwater when as far as I knew it was a first-world country, but after our experience at the Dublin airport I have a bit more understanding.  There are no signs (in any language) indicating where you go to catch the buses leaving the airport.  The buses, once you find them, insist on exact change, but there is only one change machine and it's apparently been broken for weeks.  (Naturally, the machine for the overpriced airport shuttle was working fine.)  The bus company ticket counter, for reasons it didn't care to explain, refused to accept any bill larger than 10 euros, while the ATM machines in the airport don't dispense anything smaller than a 20-euro note.  The bureau de change does not actually give change, at least in euro coins for euro notes.  In the end, as stomachs were growling and tempers shortening, we threw ourselves on the mercy of the Irish Tourist Board office, which changed a 20-euro note for us, and escaped the airport.

During the bus ride into town, I learned an important lesson -- when you are on a day trip, you really should pay more attention to things like whether your bus is the express or the local.  The bus took over an hour to get to the town centre, stopping at every corner between the airport and the city to pick up a single senior citizen on each corner.  Between the senior citizens and the two groups of jetlagged American schoolkids, it was one full bus.  

But we got there at last, and all was forgiven once we sat down at the famous Dublin institution, Bewley's Oriental Cafe (so named for its Egyptian-style facade), for a traditional Irish breakfast.  I don't know what I was expecting, but as far as I can tell there are no discernible differences between the traditional Irish breakfast and the traditional English breakfast, except that the Irish one includes blood pudding as a (thankfully optional) side dish.  Bewleys is known for its coffee and pastries -- we didn't try the latter, being too full after the Irish breakfast, but the coffee was excellent.  

Suitably fortified, we headed off to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells.  For some reason, I’d thought that there wouldn't be much of a queue, maybe because I figured that a centuries-old medieval book wouldn't be high on most tourists' lists of must-sees.  At the least I was expecting an adult audience, thinking that no one would be crazy enough to drag their kids to see what most kids would think of as an old book.  But I didn't count on two things: A) the number of tour groups that like to include a bit of culture on their itineraries and B) the US National Youth Ambassadors, 100 or so kids (2 from each state) who got into the queue right behind us looking like they thought they were about to be drawn and quartered.  

The Book of Kells exhibit includes a fascinating examination of medieval book-binding and manuscript creation.  Unfortunately, while the creators of the exhibit had great design sense (it was full of gorgeous 9-foot-tall full-colour enlargements of some of the most colourful pages in the book) they were also rather logistically challenged -- the panels were scattered around the room at random, leaving people to wander in a daze rather than taking the steps in the book-making process in any sort of order.  Somewhere inside the maze we found a great film on book-binding that finally explained why old books have those ridges on their spines (they're part of the binding) and helped me understand why books were once the province of the rich -- months or even years of work could go into making a single book. Thank God for Herr Gutenberg and his printing press.  

As great as the exhibit was, it was only a lead-up to the real thing.  The Book of Kells is displayed in a specially lit (well, specially darkened) room in a hermetically sealed glass case.  Its pages are turned every so often, so what you see is sort of random.  Unfortunately, the book wasn't open to any of the really colourful pages when we visited; still, the illuminated pages were stunningly beautiful, and as a bonus we got to take a peek at two of the other library's other medieval manuscripts in the same case.  After the book room, stairs lead up to the college library proper, where the air is permeated with the smell of old leather-bound books.  In addition to the busts of famous writers and philosophers, there is a case holding the oldest extant Irish harp (the same one pictured on Ireland's coinage), a graceful thing of dark burnished wood carved with delicate reliefs.  For some reason I expected something a bit smaller, but this was a majestic instrument fit for a master bard.  And hidden at the end of the room, there was a surprise awaiting the enterprising visitor who resisted the temptation to head for the gift shop -- another page from the Book of Kells, featuring the famous illuminated figure of St John.  

We broke for lunch and adjourned to a modern Irish restaurant, which had a prix fixe menu with an unusually large number of options.  Modern Irish food apparently means fresh local ingredients cooked with a minimum of fuss to allow the flavours of the food to shine through – sounds fine by me!  My crab spring roll and crispy salmon was delicious, as was the Brambley apple creme brulee that followed -- all for the price of a cheap meal in London.  

After lunch, we headed for the National Museum, where there was supposedly a Viking longboat rescued from a bog. Armed with our trusty Time Out guide, I strode through the tall iron gates of a grand, official looking building, only to be stopped short by a security guard who informed us that we were about to enter the Irish parliament and that the museum was in fact next door.  The museum was arranged chronologically (Viking Ireland, Medieval Ireland, Pre-Historic Ireland, and, for some reason, Ancient Egypt).  We headed for the Viking room, where we found a longboat parked outside.  It was a great looking boat, but obviously not recovered from a bog -- the wood was pristine and varnished, and the oars still smelled faintly like new wood.  But there were some great exhibits on the Vikings who came to Ireland and their impact on different aspects of Irish culture -- I never realised that the Vikings had raided Ireland, or that some of the things we think of as Celtic are actually Norse in origin.  An especially cool aspect of the exhibit was that many of the artifacts had been discovered in Dublin, and the layout of the city still recalls its Viking past.  It was amazing how well the bogs had preserved things like cloth and leather -- there were shoes, satchels, and bits of cloth, all thousands of years old.  

In the pre-historic Ireland exhibit we found the boat from the bog -- apparently it was a logboat, not a longboat, carved from a single oak tree by pre-historic Irish people.  Bog oak is an incredibly dark colour -- not lustrously dark the way ebony is dark, but densely dark with a dull gleam.  Even when polished it seems to absorb light rather than reflect it.  One of the boat's builders might very well have been in the room -- a nearby case contained an equally blackened bog mummy.  

The Gold of Ireland was both impressive and educational -- as well as the expected gold collars, torcs, armbands, bracelets, and rings there were immense gold earplugs, which looked like giant spools.  The largest was probably about five or six inches in diameter.  After piercing, the earlobes were stretched to fit around the outside of the spool, reminiscent of the tradition followed by the Maasai in present-day Tanzania. It was only later that more traditional pierced earrings started to be made.  Some of the torcs were twisted into elegant spirals, something I've never seen before.  The most beautiful piece was the famous Tara brooch, appropriately ensconced in The Treasury, where the greatest historical treasures were kept.  Another particularly striking piece was a tiny boat made of hammered gold, complete with little gold oars.  

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the town, poking into little streets and checking out pubs and shops.  Naturally, there were lots of places selling Celtic-themed jewellery, etc., as well as thick woolly jumpers (30% off during the summer).  There were also some wonderful galleries showcasing modern Irish design and art.  And yes, the Guinness really does taste better in Ireland -- smoother, without the bitter edge it can sometimes have in England.  

We arrived at the airport only to find that our plane was delayed, which gave us time for a final cup of delicious hot chocolate at the airport branch of Butler's Chocolate Cafe (another Irish institution), while planning what we would do when we came back...