I’m late in updates…but the weekend of the 24-25th of July, I went to the festival of world cultures in Dún Laoghaire (south of Dublin), and up to Bray (North of Dublin), but I won’t be posting about that, if you want to see pictures, go to the Ireland week 6 photo album.


This past Wednesday July 29th 2010, I went to take a tour of Dublin (even though I’ve been in Dublin for 7 weeks already).  But we had a  tour guide that told us about the history of Dublin.  Home of the Irish author, James Joyce of the famous work Ulysses. Shortly after Dublin celebrated the annual recognition of Ulysses in early July, Dublin received the title of the City of Literature by UNESCO‘s City of Literature program.

Well, let’s get on with the city:
This area used to be the slums of Dublin in the early 1900s, but now it’s pretty modernized

This is one of the apartment buildings (right) that author Sean O’Casey used to live in, he put his experiences in the slums into writing his plays. There used to be families living in these rooms, and the conditions were very bad that most children died either at child birth, or never made it past the age of 10.  You can see that this apartment building is well remodeled, but some of the archways at the entrance were never restored (right).

I found the Chinatown of Dublin: lol!

So apparently this apartment building(below) on the hill is one of the better off people in the old times, during the slums. They used to have a great view of the city, but today, that apartment building is just another apartment building, and the view isn’t that great from there, because there’s a modernized building blocking the view.

To the left is a church built during British rule, hidden onto a small road in the city, a message to the British that the Irish are slowly rising to power.

To the bottom right is the education department.  Apparently in the early 1900s the the street behind this building had the largest Red-light district in Europe because most of the ladies lived in poverty, drove them to do such an act.

Here’s an excerpt (below) from one of Sean O’Casey’s plays:

The image on the bottom right is the center of Dublin:

 
After seeing the city, I saw an Irish play by Sean O’Casey at the Abbey Theatre.  I’ll post the name of the play later.  It was a great play!  I had trouble understanding what they were saying at first because they had thick Irish accents, but I got used to it by the end.  They didn’t let me take any pictures inside the theater, so I couldn’t show the performance was like.