In a stately 18th-century Georgian home in Ireland’s capital, the Little Museum of Dublin is where history lets its hair down.
“Twenty-nine minutes from now, you and I will have traveled through 200,000 years of Irish history,” Mark McKenna, a museum guide, announced to visitors on a recent tour. “The first 199,000 can be summarized in five words: ‘It was cold and wet.’”
Visits to the museum (entrance, 18 euros, or about $21) — which is part improv theater, part history lesson — start with a guided tour of two memorabilia-filled rooms featuring a fast-paced comic narrative that touches on the city’s Viking roots, its English rule and emergence as the capital of independent Ireland.
“I want to share some history with you, but I want to keep you all awake, so we’re going to have some ‘craic’ and that means fun,” said Mr. McKenna, using the Gaelic term for good times.
According to the national tourism development office Fáilte Ireland, the top reason the Irish visit Dublin is for “social energy.” It’s a people-centric approach to pursuing craic that my sister and I, on a three-day fall visit, found dovetailed with budget travel.
From free traditional music sessions to storytelling tours, here are five affordable approaches to exploring the energetic Irish capital.
The Pedestrian Payoff
Dublin is well connected by a public transportation system that includes buses and light rail trams. A discounted Leap Visitor Card from the agency Transportation for Ireland costs €8 for one day of unlimited rides, €18 for three and €24 for seven. The Dublin Express bus between the airport and the city center costs €9.
The city is also compact enough to tackle largely on foot, which introduces pedestrians to another of Dublin’s compelling traditions: the busker scene.
Music enlivens the city’s commercial streets, especially along shop-lined Grafton Street between Trinity College and St. Stephen’s Green, where the likes of U2’s Bono, Glen Hansard and Damien Rice played for tips early in their careers.
Today, buskers need a permit and can perform for no longer than an hour before changing locations. The tradition draws musicians from near and far. One sign, from a duo performing as the Brown Eyed Sisters, introduced them as “two sisters from Brazil” who “came to Ireland to sing on its famous streets.”
Whatever brings you to Dublin, try to visit on a Sunday when live music packs the pubs, the Hugh Lane Gallery holds free concerts and a weekly art fair pops up at Merrion Square.
At Merrion Square, a Georgian park in central Dublin, artists hang paintings and sketches on the street sides of its iron fence for the weekly Merrion Square Open-Air Art Gallery. Landscapes, seascapes and architectural drawings dominated the collection that we caught on a sunny morning with no intention of buying, though small originals were going for a tempting €60.
About 30 minutes’ walk north, the Hugh Lane Gallery in Parnell Square, devoted to Modern and contemporary art, was holding its free Sunday concerts at the nearby Abbey Presbyterian Church while the museum is under renovation. Concertgoers can obtain free tickets online beginning the Monday before the show.
In the Gothic-style church, we caught the classically trained, Britain-based guitarists Peter and Zoltan Katona. Performing as the Katona Twins, they astonished the audience with a set that included works by Bach, the jazz musician Django Reinhardt and the Beatles.
Beginning Sunday afternoons, pubs across the city hold free sessions, or informal gatherings of musicians usually playing around a table rather than on a stage.
It took me two visits to get a glimpse of the popular quintet performing traditional folk songs at the Brazen Head — said to be Ireland’s oldest pub, established in 1198 — from 3 to 6 p.m. When successful, I arrived before the music started. When not, I was crammed in the back with latecomers, where views were scant but spirits high.
The furniture was pushed to the periphery to make room for dancing at the 6:30 p.m. Sunday session across the street at the pub O’Shea’s Merchant, featuring the guitarist and songwriter Luke Price and the accordionist Cormac Murphy.
“We’ll go through all the Irish stuff and a few others,” said Mr. Price, launching into exuberant reels and sad ballads balanced by covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and the Irish rock band the Cranberries.
City of Storytellers
A UNESCO City of Literature, Dublin nurtured W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw and Seamus Heaney. One of its biggest attractions, the Book of Kells, is an illuminated manuscript roughly dating to the year 800 (entrance from €19).
The Irish way with words distinguishes Dublin’s cultural offerings, starting at the Little Museum of Dublin, which often hires actors as tour guides.
After a guided introduction, visitors are free to roam the four-story museum to take in its quirky exhibits, including a room devoted to the Irish band U2, a gallery of street photography, Ireland’s oldest public telephone box (where guests can still make a call) and a framed collection of tennis balls discarded by the dogs of Dun Laoghaire, a nearby coastal town.
“We’re a museum that thinks like a theater,” said its founder, Trevor White, whom I met near a 22-room Georgian dollhouse. “It’s a museum for people who don’t want to be in museums.”
Depending on who’s telling the story, Dublin’s Liberties neighborhood is either the coolest or the most marginalized. In Our Shoes Walking Tours (€15) explores the changing area around the Guinness brewery, offering history from a working-class perspective.
“Dublin was all dereliction and wasteland until the ’90s,” said Anthony Freeman O’Brien, the founder of In Our Shoes, who grew up in the Liberties, which flourished as a place of industry and trade.
Guiding our foursome, Mr. O’Brien pointed out an upscale loft development that occupies a defunct distillery beside a 1930s housing project, and a pedestrian alley scheduled for demolition to make way for a hotel and a monument engraved with the names of famous street characters including Bang Bang and Stab the Rasher.
The many stories Mr. O’Brien packed into 90 minutes included an explanation of Dublin’s colorful front doors: a defiant response to Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, when the English demanded they be painted black.
Back in the city center at the archaeology-focused National Museum of Ireland — Kildare Street (free), we were enraptured by an Irish tale about human sacrifice in the Iron Age as we visited a series of dim rooms containing “bog bodies,” ancient remains preserved in Irish peat bogs.
Global Food, Local Flair
About one in five people living in Dublin are not Irish, a statistic that syncs up with the city’s food scene, which is full of multicultural delights.
In the nightlife-centric district of Temple Bar, we enjoyed generous Middle Eastern kebab dinners (€16 for chicken) and flatbreads (€14.50 for ground lamb and beef) at the quick-service restaurant Zaytoon.
At lunch, the Tang cafe, which has three locations, offers a flatbread hybrid topped with hummus, Moroccan lamb, Lebanese beans, carrots, cabbage and salsa rolled up like a burrito (€9.75).
At Little Dumpling near St. Stephen’s Green, handmade dumplings were the star of the Chinese menu. Four wild mushroom or roast duck dumplings cost €9; a selection of 11, one of each variety, was €25.
Dublin’s bakeries invite splurging on a small scale. At Bread 41, near Trinity College, we joined the line for its daily pastries, which included salted caramel knots, cheese and onion tarts, potato Danish and muffin-shaped croissants known as cruffins (most €4 to €6).
Part bakery, part grocer, part neighborhood hangout, the Fumbally in the Liberties sources ingredients from local farms and sustainable suppliers. Its signature Fumbally eggs (€12.90) come scrambled in olive oil and garlic with semisoft Gubbeen cheese on toasted brioche (€15, with coffee before 10 a.m.).
Stylish, Affordable Hotels
In Dublin, cheaper hotel options don’t necessarily scrimp on style or sacrifice location.
We found our first hotel, Zanzibar Locke, near the pedestrian Ha’penny Bridge, across the River Liffey from Temple Bar. The location alone might have commanded higher rates. Our residential-style studio included an efficiency kitchen, a sofa, a dining table, a king-size bed and a spacious bathroom for about €125. Its lobby coffee shop was too convenient to pass up €4.20 lattes and €3.50 scones.
In the Smithfield neighborhood, a 15-minute walk west along the river, we checked into Generator Dublin, where the lobby bar with shuffleboard tables made a lively welcome.
A hostel brand with locations in New York and a dozen cities in Europe, Generator offers a variety of rooms other than standard dorms with shared baths (which start at €18 a bed). Private options include doubles with king beds (from €72) and family rooms (from €75), both with en suite bathrooms. On a weekend night, I paid €106 for a private double with a cheerful mural and a wall of windows.
Generator is among the slicker developments in Smithfield, but it’s only a block away from one of Dublin’s longstanding draws, the Cobblestone pub, where the craic — if you haven’t found it yet — flows daily at free music sessions.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
