Museums, Museums, Museums

On our last full day in Dublin, we hit a bunch of free museums.  We started out the day at the National Gallery.  It was okay but half of it was closed.  We did enjoy a Rembrandt painting of a spanking game.  There was also a beautiful sculpted Adonis whose hands looked so lifelike that I expected him to reach for me at any moment.

Then, we went to the Natural History Museum, which I didn't really enjoy.  It consisted of two huge galleries of cases full of taxidermied animals of all sorts.  And some skeletons.  Instead of curious, I really just felt sad about the lion and other cubs that were labeled as born at the same location and were therefore obviously killed to be stuffed.  And the many baby birds.  Give me fake animals any day.

Next, we stopped by the National Library (see, it says library above my head):

We couldn't see much of it, but the main reading room was very cool.  I always think I could get a lot of work done in an inspirational location like that - a huge domed room lined with books and filled with tables containing the traditional library reading lamps.

Then, we wandered around and looked at the outside of Christchurch Cathedral (you had to pay for a tour of the inside, of course):

Finally, we discovered my favorite museum in all of Dublin: the Chester Beatty Library (also free), located on the grounds of Dublin Castle (which is a governmental building that is closed to the public for 7 months due to some EU stuff).  The picture below is part of Dublin Castle and its gardens (Chester Beatty is off to the left, not in the picture).

If you're ever in Dublin, go to this museum.  Chester Beatty was a collector of many cool works of art, including tons of illuminated manuscripts from many different cultures, Asian scrolls and other materials, paintings, and more.  It's well laid out and not very crowded - at least when we were there.

And lastly, I'll leave you with a picture from this morning at St. Stephen's Green while we wandered around (freezing! I am wearing 5 shirts in that picture) killing time before we went to the airport to fly to Greece.