The price is right.

In general, 2 pounds and 2 pence won't buy you much here in the UK. However, as I discovered during a fluke and fleeting Ryanair sale a couple of weeks ago, that was exactly the price of a round-trip flight to Dublin, all taxes included! So on Tuesday, I got up early, caught an 8 a.m. flight, and found myself in Dublin by the time the museums opened. I spent the day roaming around the centre, then headed back to the airport after dinner and was back here at my desk in Bristol by 10:45 that night.

In general, Dublin itself was less amazing than the fact that I was able to get there and back for the price of a cup of coffee. Still, it was a good day, the most pleasurable parts (as usual) being the most unexpected.

I can only give my impressions of the centre of Dublin, as I didn't have time to get farther afield, but in general I didn't find it overly charming. It looks and feels like what it is: the stag party capital of Europe, overrun with foreign tourists, including a sizable community of easily identifiable American studiers-abroad (the women are the easiest to spot: North Face fleece jackets, Ugg boots, straightened hair, designer handbags, obnoxiously loud voices, usually talking about past or future nights out). Apart from the tourists, the streets and parks were generally filled by beggars, homeless, and a lot of people generally down on their luck. It's hard to enjoy a day in a place where it's so obvious that people who spend their lives there are certainly not enjoying themselves. I don't think I expected a pristine, cheerful city -- this isn't the impression that Ulysses and Dubliners create, and Joyce is the major source of my mental picture of Dublin -- but the overall grottiness of it all (to use a favorite Anglicism) was striking nonetheless.

But, as I said, there were highlights. St. Stephen's Green was lovely in full bloom, and I enjoyed a wander through the National Gallery, which has a fine collection of 20th century Irish paintings. There was an especially good exhibit of Jack B. Yeats, whose work I'd never seen before. I got a kick out of walking through Trinity College at lunchtime and watching the students sitting out on the grass reading or chatting and generally doing their thing. Student life is pretty much the same the world over, of course, but it's fun to see in different places.

The highlight of the day also came with a reminder of a useful travel tip: follow large groups of senior citizens (except into the 4:30 dinner buffet). They usually know what's up. This is exactly what I did when I ran into a slow-moving bunch around the back of Dublin Castle, which I was wandering around because I didn't want to pay to go in. I followed the old folks through a gate and across a pretty little garden to the Chester Beatty Library, of which I hadn't heard, but admission was free, so I decided to have a look. I still don't know how this Beatty fellow made his money, but he must have had absolute boatloads, to judge from the selections from his collection that were on display. On the top floor of the building, I found an amazing exhibit of some of the oldest extant papyri of the Gospels and fragments from the first collection of Paul's letters. It was pretty thrilling to be able to make out the Greek letters and even a word here and there. There was also a huge 11th century (I think) illuminated manuscript of Augustine's City of God and several other interesting fragments of third and fourth-century Christian texts. Thanks, oldsters, for the hot tip!

Another high point came after a rather disappointing visit to the James Joyce Centre (different from the museum, and certainly not worth the price of admission). Budget traveler's trip #2: if you don't want to pay to go into a famous church, come back for Mass/Evensong etc. and see it for free. I pulled this one with Christ Church, and it turned out to be a really charming experience. I arrived pretty much right on time, and no one else was there except the guy leading the service (he was filling in for the Dean, who was absent, and the choir was also out of town). At the last minute, a couple other American tourists wandered in with bags from the Guinness Factory and sat down by me. And that was the whole crowd! The service leader read his part, and the three of us rather uncertainly read the respondents' part off the sheet we were given (it was obvious that none of us were Anglican). We may have missed a few words, but I guess we kept the service from getting canceled that night!

After Evensong, I wandered down to have a look at St. Patrick's Cathedral and then had an absurdly overpriced dinner of bangers and mash and a pint of Murphy's in the Temple Bar quarter before getting the bus back to the airport. Well, not the bus, as it happens -- the bus failed to show up three times in a row, so a few other panicked tourists and I ended up sharing a big cab. It was worth the extra fiver to make sure I got home. And that was the day! I slept like a dead person and made it through the next day at work with the help of a couple double espressos. Hooray for the perks of my new job.