Sk-etchbook

I went to Dublin for a few days last week. I had been once before but was about 10 at the time so this was a very different experience. My first thoughts were that pints are bloody expensive and there are not a lot of Irish inhabitants there. However like most cosmopolitan capitals it seems to attract cultures from all around the world which create an interesting mix of people, opinions and social interaction. It has a friendly atmosphere and has some really picturesque areas and a fantastic coloured stone is used in the local castles, the weather's not brilliant and, a slightly strange thing to notice but I'll mention it all the same, it has fantastic waste management.

We went to the Chester Beatty Library while we were there, this was full of eye candy in the form of ancient scripts, books and various other trinkets. There was some amazing calligraphy and illustration involved, works from China, Japan, Egypt, Turkey & Persia. It's easy to forget in our society of mass production an free access to creative materials what a specialist art form the creation of written text used to be and what treasured items books were.

My preferred item for ideological reasons not for aesthetics were the Egyptian
scrolls of the dead. These were a kind of guide or instruction manual that were buried with the dead. I like the notion of the recently departed sitting there reading the words "So, now that you're dead...".

It was a good experience and is useful for broadening my horizons, I'm hopefully going to get away to at least one other country over the summer.