Mummified Animals With No Admission Fee

Well, the weekend brought with it a number of interesting opportunities, as weekends ought to. Friday afternoon, as Sarah and I sighed in simultaneous relief for the end of the workweek (we’re not sure how you office people do it….but I guess we better get used to the 9-5 schedule….) and Erica completed her first day at her new job, we were fortunate enough to discover that it was Culture Night in lovely Dublin-town. Culture Night, we were delighted to find, meant that almost all of the city’s cultural attractions were free for the night, and open late (until 11pm).

We began Culture Night by wandering to a kebab house, Momo’s (haha), for a quick and satisfying dinner before making our way over the Liffey to the other side of town….the dreaded Southside (for those of you out of the loop, there is a bit of a rivalry between the North Side and the South Side, and we live on the North Side, so hence the animosity….). We decided first to try to see the Book of Kells at Trinity College. Despite the fact that you were supposed to have a ticket to get in (they were free, but you were still supposed to get one), Erica talked us past the guard and we were able to take our free tour of the museum dedicated to the manuscript that was created sometime in the early 9th century. The Book of Kells certainly did not disappoint. It was beautiful and old and intriguing…..everything that you would want in a 1000-some year-old illuminated manuscript. The tour also included a visit to the famous Long Room of the Trinity College Library, which houses about 200,000 of the library’s oldest books. Picture the Library from “Beauty and the Beast” and you might get an idea for the feel of the Long Room. As many of you can guess, all three of us bookworms could barely resist jumping the ropes that kept visitors from the shelves and grabbing as many of the old books as we could get our grubby hands on.

We made our way from Trinity College down Dame Street to Christchurch Cathedral (about a 10 minute walk). It was begun in about 1030 and has been a spot for continued worship since then, though the building has been changed many times over the years. The structure was quite imposing, but the coolest parts of our exploration of the church was the crypt. Down there we saw sarcophagi, a display about the objects used in worship (silver spoons and so forth), an interesting little aside about King William III (go Tribe!) and a mummified cat and rat. If you stopped short on that last bit, so did we. Apparently the cat was chasing the rat around the church in the mid 1800’s and they both got caught in the pipe of the organ, where they were mummified. Pretty morbid, but also pretty hilarious (see picture below).

St. Patrick’s Cathedral was the last spot for our Culture Night tour of Dublin. A church has stood on the spot of St.Pat’s since the 5th Century, but the current structure was built in the early 13th century. It is the largest church in the entire country, and it was pretty impressive. Especially at night. There is something about going into a church at night that is both spooky and impressive—probably because it is not the normal time that you see them. It was quite an enjoyable experience.


that rat is scarily huge...