Last weekend I went to Dublin, and as with Madrid I think a preemptive entry summarizing my trip and comparing London to Dublin is in order before I go into agonizing detail about every little thing I did last weekend. So let’s see:

I was traveling with my cousin and together we were visiting our mutual second cousin and her family in Dublin, so my experience there was a lot different from my trip to Madrid. Instead of living in a flat with other college kids I was staying with a family that had three children, ranging in age from eleven to two so my experience was necessarily a little different. I was excused from having to do any sort of Dublin pub crawl or going clubbing (which was a good thing, in my opinion clubbing gets a little old after a while, and is no more less fun in one city than another. A fun night in a club in London is the same as a fun night at a club in New York or ((presumably)) Dublin. If one is going to spend time in a new city, particularly if one is only going to spend a little time there, it’s nice to have as many sober waking hours as possible in order to do everything. Also, it was way too cold for club clothes, but I digress.), and many of our destinations were dictated by whether or not they included child-friendly activities.

That said, I think I got a better sense of Dublin than I did of Madrid. In Madrid I got the “student experience” which was really neat to see, but staying with a family gave me a better sense of what it would be like to live and work in Dublin. Also, my cousin was nice enough to take us around to all of the tourist sights that she’d seen a million times, but that were definitely interesting for me and my cousin to see for the first. I’d missed “doing the tourist thing” in Madrid, which was probably for the best because we stuck out enough as it was.

So here’s the laundry list:
Dublin is first and foremost a much smaller city than London. I don’t mean that it felt less like a city, there are certain sidewalks that were just as crowded as any in London, but the city itself takes up less space. This means that Dublin is a fabulous walking city. We were able to see the whole thing by foot and survive blister free. Dublin is much shorter than London as well. The buildings were seldom more than four or five stories, which meant that there was a lot of light in the streets. I liked being able to see the sky because Irish skies are incredible. They seem to always be filled with clouds but sunny at the same time, which creates the most amazing light effects. Of course, our trip had more than its fair share of rain (I think we brought some of the London weather with us), but we also had a few moments of truly breathtaking views. At such a moment, being able to see the sky and still be in the middle of the city was a great experience.

Dublin also feels closer to nature. The Thames runs through London, but it is very much an urban river (the cleanest urban river in Europe as I found out at the aquarium. I think I may have mentioned that before). The River Liffey that runs through Dublin feels somehow closer to being an actual river than another urban landmark. I think part of that may be that it’s only a hop skip and a jump to Dublin Bay, that the river runs into. One of the things we did this weekend was drive to the beach and have a picnic looking out over the water. Aside from being another fabulous chance to admire the Irish sky, it really made it feel as if Dublin was planted among natural phenomena. London feels like the landscape was put in on top of the city, Dublin as if the city was built on the land.

Dublin is much more aware of it’s literary history. Maybe because there were so many writers in London, or maybe because there is so much more than just literary London to focus on, London does not glorify its writers in the same manner as Dublin. Yes I’ve found landmarks dedicated to Dickens, Johnson and Shakespeare scattered throughout the city, but I’ve more or less stumbled across them because there is very little fanfare surrounding London writers. Not so the writers in Dublin. Beckett, Wilde, Stoker and above all James Joyce are given more than their proper due. There are tours you can take and multiple monuments a piece to each writer, as well as a museum dedicated solely to Irish writers. I actually felt like I missed out on a large part of the Irish cultural experience because I haven’t read Ulysses. My cousin said she never really understood Joyce until she moved to Ireland and heard him read with an Irish accent. I think that may be what I’m missing, because my attempts at him have not been very satisfying.   

Irish brogues are a lot easier to pick up than English accents. I don’t know why this is. My cousin who lives there was born and raised in Nashville Tennessee and now speaks with a heavy Irish accent. I used to suspect that it might be an affectation, but after spending half a day in Dublin I found myself slipping in and out of Irish speech patterns. It’s curious because I’ve lived for over two months now in the middle of London in a flat full of British people, and I haven’t found myself slipping into a British accent ever. I’ve noticed myself picking up some of the vocabulary that the British kids use (I now use “well” as an embellisher as in “those boots are well nice” and say “fit” instead of cute) but none of the British inflections. I think part of that maybe due to the fact that there are so many different English accents to chose from that no one speech pattern sticks, but in Ireland everybody seemed to have the same brogue with varying degrees of thickness, or at least so it seemed to my uncultured American ears. The result is that Irish absorbs much quicker than British.

And the last cultural distinction I can make between the two cities is that in Dublin people eat French fries sandwiches. My cousin tried to convince us that this was, in fact, a cultural advantage, but while I can safely recommend Irish brown bread and Guinness, I failed to see the culinary greatness of the chip bundy, as it was called. Perhaps it’s like Joyce and requires a proper accent to understand, but when it comes to junk food I’m going to stick with fish and chips.