Continuing on with my exploration of Dublin – I made a point to keep wandering, and keep poking around, as the MBA kicked off and our classes started getting more intense. My friend Brian came to visit, we explored, and I went out with friends from the class! We toured the Teeling distillery, and had a glorious grand old time.
I even got an invite to a pretty cool comedy event in town called “ADHD&D”, a very off-the-wall live D&D game, which was basically a live recording of a dungeons and dragons podcast, where the audience got to participate and help write the story. It was fun, and a grand opportunity to meet up with people both from class, and some friends from outside of class, and just get a good bit of exposure to “Dublin Craic”, just general good times.
Turns out, taking an MBA in Ireland is a bit consuming – both mentally, and temporally.
I’ve been adoring my time in Dublin so far, meeting people and learning new things, and my days have been full of wonder and adventure – full enough that some things had to fall by the wayside. Things like video games, blog posts, and even rock climbing.
They’re necessary sacrifices, though – I’m not unhappy about any of those sacrifices, since I know they’re in the short term as I build the foundation for the next steps of this adventure I call life. Thankfully, I’ve been on a bit of a holiday break recently and have been able to get a bit caught up on all of those fun things that I’ve let slide.
Sit back, dear readers, and prepare yourselves to be regaled by a few tales of my life in Dublin, during the first series of modules for my new degree.
I am now a resident of Dublin 8, specifically an area known as The Liberties.
It’s a beautiful section of the city – close to the central city, an 8min bike ride from Trinity, and a short walk from pretty much everything I could ask for. The view out my window is unequivocally Dublin – The Guinness Brewery rises to one side, St Patrick’s Cathedral to the other, and the John’s Lane Church (Church of St Augustine and St John) soars right in the middle.
It’s beautiful, and I was ecstatic to hear that the community manager for my apartment would be organizing a walking tour of the neighborhood. I signed up immediately.
I knew I was a gentrifier, since towering steel and glass monstrosity, but I didn’t quite realize the scope of the situation until our guide started explaining it all to us. The Liberties is an old part of Dublin, and had historically been a fairly low income area… It’s not a bad, or dangerous, neighborhood by any means, but it’s also not a thriving or wealthy neighborhood.
Our guide walked us through the town – showing us some amazing landmarks, some challenging parts of history, and some very interesting little tidbits about the town.
It all crystallized into a clear picture to me – this was a community, nothing like what I’d left behind in Oregon. As we walked, our guide’s family members popped out their doors or windows to say hi. His Grandma waved from a balcony, and his niece and nephew swept by on their bikes. Friends came out to welcome us, and schoolkids that he’d taught shouted greetings from the other side of the street.
It was vibrant, and lived in, and growing.
I can’t wait to get to know it better.
A few standout things to mention: – We saw the oldest fruit tree in Ireland! A pear tree, over 200 years old. – We walked through a community park, brand new, that the people of the Liberties had been lobbying for for years, and had finally gotten approved. – We had the opportunity to see a small community test garden, used to help bring schoolkids out of the city and into a small oasis of growing things – Our guide is a beekeeper, who runs a series of 50+ hives throughout Dublin, ensuring the pollinator population remains strong
