Harry and Ellen's Celtic Odyssey

2 Templeton Scholars, 9 days, 2 countries, and innumerable cups of tea. 1 remarkable Celtic trip--not just a trip, an Odyssey. Perhaps my flair for the dramatic is getting away with itself, but my Independent Learning Week adventure this year really was epic, at least colloquially, but perhaps in the original Homeric sense.

It's an unofficial tradition for students in the Templeton Honors College to visit each other during semesters abroad, if possible. No one else was studying in Europe during my semester abroad at St. Andrews, so I made up for lost time as an alumna this year. My friend* Harry is studying abroad in Dublin this semester, so the two of us made plans to visit each other in Ireland and Scotland. As we were planning these trips, we discovered that our reading weeks (or fall breaks, if you prefer) followed each other in October, so we made plans for me to visit Dublin for a few days, then to travel back to St. Andrews together for a few days. The resulting 9 days of pan-Celtic sightseeing were too crammed with fun for me to write about everything, so I'll hit the highlights (in not quite chronological order) and try to keep from writing a book instead of a blog post!

Dublin

After an hour-long flight delay and an hour-long bus ride from the airport, I arrived in Dublin hungry for something with potatoes in it. Our first stop after dropping off my bags was a pub for dinner and live music. I tried some beef stew, which was delicious, and a pint of Guinness, which is probably delicious if you like beer.

My first full day in Dublin was quite rainy--"the most rain I've seen in Dublin since I got here," according to Harry--but we managed to stay dry enough by attending classes and visiting museums. We did brave the weather to walk around St. Stephen's Green, where we saw some beautiful foliage and a handful of ducks and swans.

We found some interesting artwork in the National Gallery of Ireland: lots of iconography and religious art. My favorite piece was a painting of scenes from the life of St. Jerome, which featured a frustrated monk who looked a bit like me when I'm translating Latin. While Harry was in class another day, I visited an exhibition on W.B. Yeates in the National Library; I was not aware that he had so many failed marriages and such a fascination with the occult. Both of us enjoyed an exhibition on Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who was only married once and was more interested in peat bogs than dark spiritual forces. I discovered several new favorite poems in a short collection I picked up as a souvenir, and Harry took home a copy of Beowulf translated by Heaney.

St. Andrews

After a fun few days in Dublin, it was time for both of us to fly into Edinburgh for a tour of Scotland! It was dark by the time we arrived at my house in St. Andrews on Saturday night, so we hit the ground running on Sunday. Harry and I attended my usual church service in the morning, followed by a visit to the Old Course and lunch at the Fisher and Donaldson cafe on South Street--fudge donut included. That evening, we attended mass at the Catholic church in town, which was celebrated by Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, the Apostolic Nuncio to Great Britain. The service was beautiful and quite elaborate; there was plenty of incense and plenty of Latin chanting, and the archbishop's sermon was insightful and well-delivered. Afterwards, I dragged Harry to my Scottish Country Dance class, where he kept up remarkably well, even with some tricky figures and casting.

In the following days, we visited some St. Andrews landmarks on our way to and from other places and events. We explored the cathedral ruins, went on a pier walk, and stepped around the PH stones outside St. Salvator's Chapel. Before attending compline on Thursday night, we browsed in Topping and Company (where they offered me tea for the first time!) and enjoyed some ice cream at Janettas.