We arrived at
Trinity College Dublin a couple hours later than expected, feeling as blurry and out-of-focus as this picture:
After some much-needed refreshment in the Trinity College Dublin Dining Hall ...
... we made a beeline for the
Chester Beatty Library, one of the two "must-see" items on my Ireland bucket list:
The
Chester Beatty Library, according to the
Lonely Planet Guide, is "not just the best museum in Dublin, but one of the best in Europe." Arthur Chester Beatty was an American millionaire who assembled the 20th century's finest private collection of ancient books and manuscripts, including some of the most important and earliest papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament and Greek Old Testament:
We were exhausted from our trip--getting up at 4 in the morning to ride our bikes across town to catch a bus at the LAST minute to the airport to catch a plane that was delayed on the runway for more than an hour, and then to catch a bus to the city center to meet up with our host, will do that to you--and a little short on time, so the visit was more cursory than I might have liked. But the main thing was to experience a few of the manuscripts, not to photograph them. (At least, that's what I said in an attempt to justify leaving my good camera behind in Cambridge.) High quality professional images of the manuscripts can indeed be studied
online at the CSNTM, but there is nothing quite like seeing and reading the actual artifact. You also get a better sense of proportion--they are a lot smaller than I expected:
The museum restaurant and the building grounds are also very nice.
When we were done, we made our way back to TCD and from there, by train, to our lodgings for the weekend...
...which were not in the "Sick & Indigent Roomkeepers Society."
No comments:
Post a Comment