Dublin Post 2: More Touring, and Worldcon Starts!

[chomiji]

A little more of the same sort of thing ...

Tuesday, August 13 -Theoretically our last day of being purely tourists. We went to Trinity College to see the Book of Kells exhibit, which is mostly not the actual book. You get to see the book only 2 pages at a time in a very dark, vault-like room, to keep the pages from deteriorating. But before you get there, the college has put up some very nice exhibits about bookmaking in general and medieval religious texts in particular, including enlargements of illuminated capital letters, discussions of the symbolism of the animals and people in the marginalia, cases displaying the ingredients for the colored inks, and so on. Then we went up to see the Long Room, a very impressive library of older books. Finally, there was an absolutely primo gift shop (very important, as I always do a lot of holiday shopping when we travel).

Display of illuminated capital letters from the Book of Kells.

The Long Room at Trinity College. The closer busts are
classical figures like Aristotle; the farther ones are people
important to the history of the college.

Then we had lunch at Avoca, one of the best meals we had in Dublin. The Mr. had fried John Dory (a fish) and I had a salad Nicoise, and we both had lovely house-made lemonade with fruit floating in it. For dessert, the Mr. had caramel pecan pie with ice cream, and I had a gluten-free trifle with ice cream on the side.

My ice cream and trifle dessert at Avoca

Avoca was also a shopping stop: they have lots of made-in-Ireland goods of a very classy sort. I bought sweets for our workplaces, and the Mr. tried on a tweed jacket, but they didn't have his proper size. So then of course we had to seek out a shop with a better assortment of tweeds. The clerk at Avoca gave us another shop name, Kevin & Howlin, and there the Mr. bought a long Irish traditional tweed vest, and we both bought tweed caps (yes, I need to get a picture of me in mine, but it's been too warm here to even think about wearing a wool tweed cap!). Then we went to the Kilkenny Shop and bought linens, which we had shipped back. (We have a lovely, huge 1920s oak table, and the Mr. likes to dress it up.)

Then, weary with our efforts at supporting the Irish economy, we dropped everything at the hotel and went to the Convention Center to get our Worldcon badges. And the Mr. even signed up to volunteer as well, apparently bespelled by my enthusiasm. And once again we ate dinner out of the fridge because tired. (And anyway, we'd had such an extravagant lunch.)

Wednesday, August 14 / Worldcon Starts - This was mostly a work day for me. I got used to the Information Desk (my staff assignment). Our section head was a very sweet Dubliner named Irene. In addition to answering general questions about Dublin and the con, we were also in charge of event sign-up. This was rather a goat rope because the con was, frankly, over-subscribed. We released batches of events twice a day: at 10 a.m. on "Day," we had the sign-ups for morning through early afternoon events on Day + 1, and then at 2 p.m., we'd have signups for the rest of Day + 1's events. Almost instantly, the convention-goers started queuing an hour or more in advance for the signups, and we had to get Con Operations to arrange ropes and stanchions to organize them so they wouldn't block the whole lobby. There was more fallout too (people initially signing up 8 of their best friends for the same Kaffeeklatsch, for example, so we had to limit signups to self + 1 ... things like that). It was exhausting.

Dublin Convention Center signage near the escalators.

After my shift was over, we went back to the hotel and I took a nap. Then we went out for my actual birthday dinner, at a well-regarded Indonesian (!) place called Chameleon. We had what we are used to calling "Rijstaffel" (Dutch for "Rice Table"), from the Indonesian place that used to be near home, but which Chameleon calls "Indonesian tapas": lots of mini dishes of different savory foods, like spiced fish steamed in a banana leaf, chicken curry with coconut milk, etc. Then we had decidedly Western desserts: the Mr. had a chocolate lava brownie with ice cream, and I had panna cotta with strawberries.