Day 2 was museum day. We went to the National Museum, National Gallery, and Natural History Museum. All three told us we were not allowed to take pictures, but the Natural History Museum was such a bizarre and wonderful place that we snuck a few.
The National Museum had “hordes” (this is apparently a technical word) of various gold objects, mostly bracelets and gold collars. The Irish Celts were some of the finest prehistoric goldsmiths in Europe. The museum dates its prehistoric gold work to 2200 – 500 BC. They also had all kinds of items from the Bronze Age – swords and pottery and hair clasps and belts and amber jewelry. Some of the odder items were gold ear spools, mediations intended to be worn in a thoroughly stretched ear piercing.
Another exhibit included the bog men and other objects recovered from Ireland’s bogs, where the conditions are perfect for preservation. No one knows for sure why these people ended up in the bogs, but it is thought they were sacrificed. They all died violently (throats cut, heads smashed, limbs missing), many without an apparent struggle. Some are thought to be upper class, based on their clean nails and absence of scars other than their death wounds. Other curious objects in this exhibit were jugs of “bog butter” – large wooden kegs of butter tossed into the bog probably as sacrifices to the gods.
National Gallery – lots of pictures, many of pouty-looking men in lace collars. Some were very pretty.
After lunch, we hit the Natural History Museum, known sometimes as the dead zoo of Dublin. The guild book described this place as “a little creepy and utterly compelling.” They were right. The museum displays approximately ten thousand preserved animals, drawn from the museum's collection of over two million. These collections have been accumulating for over two centuries. The building's layout has scarcely changed since the museum’s opening in 1857.
The overall affect of this Victorian sterility and scientific curiosity is…really interesting. Cases and cases of mammals, some preserved very well, some with neck stitches showing, mixed with jelly fish in paraffin and glass, insects so gnat-like that at first we didn't notice anything on the card, oddities like eels swallowing frogs floating in formaldehyde… It’s a weird place. They had a thylacine skeleton (Tasmanian wolf – an animal that went extinct in the 1930's, the largest carnivorous marsupial of modern times), echidnas and kangaroos, an elephant and an elephant skeleton, a whale skeleton, condors, every kind of cat and bear and dog, a Tasmanian devil, a giraffe, a kudo, and tons and tons of others. They had “the disarticulated head bones of a halibut” (which Amy said begged to be the title of a poem). And they had soil samples, bits of geological knowledge, insects, invertebrates, vast numbers of song birds. You could almost taste that early academy exuberance, when people thought you could be an expert on the entire natural world. You really could know everything about nature, collect all the known animals and find new ones along the way. If you could just name everything, then maybe you could own it or at least add it to the glorious body of natural science.And, really, does there need to be an explanation for the embryonic stages of a mouse in paraffin? I mean, come on! There it is - mouse in paraffin. Who needs an explanation?
We asked the guard if we could take pictures, and he said, “Um, well, you know, not supposed to, um, a few, maybe, not in front of me, eh-hum, eh-hum.” So we took a few in the whale and elephant room.
While we were in the museum, I felt a bit of a tickle in my throat and commented to Amy that I hoped I wasn’t getting sick. By the time we got back to the hostel a few hours later, my fever was up, and my throat felt like I’d swallowed a couple of golf balls covered in sandpaper. They don’t have Tylenol in Ireland – not even generic acetaminophen. Amy found something for me called Panadol (which I have since learned is the UK version of Tylenol; they call acetaminophen paracetamol). I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the trip, because I felt so rotten, but that night was the worst. Nearly two weeks later, I'm still getting well, but I had fun for the rest of the trip.