A Day of Culture

Saturday, Jul 26^th – A Day of Culture

 

We had we a day off from playing golf (I know … bad idea) in order to tour Dublin. It was perfect timing as it got cloudy that day and we had a few showers around noon. It was the first rain since a week earlier at Kingsbarn in St. Andrews, Scotland.

One of the things that was the buzz in Dublin was the cancellation of the Garth Brooks concerts (note plural). Apparently, the city has a limit on the number of concerts at their large public stadium (90,000 seats) because the locals do not want to put up too much with crowds and traffic and noise and all the other things that come with making money. The city offered Garth 3 concerts; Garth said that if I come that far I am doing 5 concerts. The city said OK, and 450,000 tickets sold out in one day (who knew the Irish liked American country music so much). At €100 per ticket, that’s €45,000,000 = $60,000,000 in ticket sales!!!! Who knows how much money that is in terms of food, hotels, and other social activities around a string of 5 concerts?

Well, some of the locals fought the decision and said the limit is 3 concerts. The city relented to the locals, but Garth said it is either 5 concerts or zero. The game of chicken continued until the whole deal was cancelled! The city said they didn’t need the money. The restaurateurs were livid, but some in the city were happy to see that “greedy American capitalist rebuked.” Go figure.

So we divided up according to our interests:

I and Chan went to Trinity College (the oldest college in Ireland) to see the Books of Kells (which are handwritten productions of the New Testament in calligraphy and art that were done between 700-900 AD by monks in Ireland) and the 500 year old library at Trinity. 

 


Chan and I saw a variety of sites in downtown Dublin, including St. Augustine Catholic Church which was very ornate and beautiful.

 

Jack and Paul went to the 500 year old brewery (Guinness) to take a tour and drink themselves silly (actually I and Chan had been on the Guinness tour in a previous trip to Dublin).

 

At least Paul got a picture of the plaque commemorating the birth of modern statistics at the brewery where the master brewer William Sealy Gossett derived the t-test and changed the course of data collection and statistical analysis.


The Guinness tour has a profound impact on Jack, who showed an enlightened interest in the field of Mathematics and Statistics, and now he wants to go back to college to learn more so he can optimize Cathy’s Concepts. He spent the rest of the day asking I questions about the Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem, which I was happy to explain on the back of Jack’s many napkins that accompanied each Guinness he drank. By the next day Jack had no recollection of any such discussions. Oh well, so much for Cathy’s Concepts.

Of course, Paul was checking out the local talent at the bar on top of the Guinness Brewery.

We met at the Brazen Head for lunch. The Brazen Head is the oldest pub in Ireland and one of the oldest continuously operated eateries in all of Europe. It has been open for business since 1198 on the same spot as it is today. We had great Irish pub food: fish and chips, mussels and Thai chicken curry. Yes, you seem to be able to get really good Thai curry throughout Ireland. Who’da thunk?!?! Our waitress was a wee lassie who looked no more than 16 (like our caddies at Royal – don’t forget the Royal – County Down), and we asked how old one had to be to drink in Ireland and to serve alcohol in Ireland. The answer was 18 years old. Then the young lassie knew that we knew that she knew she was not 18 and she said, “I’ll get your check.”

Mid-afternoon saw us driving the REAL highway from Dublin to Kinsale. When we arrived in Kinsale to play Old Head, we first had to find our way to the Blindgate House B&B. Now Ms. Garmin took us through the really quaint town but with exceptionally narrow roads as well. It was more gut-wrenching than the country roads because there are people all around.  [Note: these town streets are so narrow that when we walked to dinner that evening we had to walk 2-by-2 since the 5 of us – which included Marty – could not fit 5 abreast.] So, a street that could not handle 5 people was supposed to handle two-way traffic and still had sidewalks!! People on the sidewalks have to duck into doorways for us to get by with our wheels up on the sidewalks. It was the same with approaching cars as they went up on sidewalks as well. Then came a 170 degree hairpin turn that Marty had to negotiate by going forward and backward 6 times until we could get around the bend – not to mention that it was up a steep hill turn and the guy in the BMW behind us wasn’t cutting us any slack. Congrats to Marty again. When we got to the Blindgate House, Chan used all of his medical expertise to revive Paul.

 

Note that Blindgate House is very, very nice and is run by a lovely lady named Mauve. Kinsale is the culinary capital of Ireland – really, it is. It is right on the harbor and has many nice restaurants. We went to dinner that night at the best of the best – Man Friday – and had an exceptional meal … and we all agreed it was exceptional. After dinner, the commoners went into town to explore the local culture (that a euphemism for ‘bar hopping’) while the sane folk went back to the Blindgate House.