Joyce, Yeats and Wilde... and lots of random pictures

I'm posting pictures on facebook, just in case you're wondering. I'm too lazy to figure out how to upload them again on here. Today we started with Joyce tours. The first one was given by a girl who totally looked Irish... and sounded American. Turns out she's from Alaska, go figure. She showed us some spots mentioned in stories from Dubliners. Then we met up with another tour guide who showed us spots mentioned in Ulysses. It was very interesting. I tried to take pictures of the plaques on the ground marking places mentioned in Ulysses, but I don't think many of them turned out well. The sun light and shadows were kind of weird because it was mid-day and the inscriptions of text would have been hard to read anyway. After the Joyce tour we split up and went to lunch. After that we split up again and some of us went to Trinity College for the exhibit on the Book of Kells (no photography allowed because the texts are so old). That was pretty interesting, and I got a Trinity t-shirt at the gift shop. Then we walked through the campus. There were a couple of games of what looked like cricket going on as we passed. Then we went to Archbishop Ryan Park for the Wilde statue sitting on a rock there, or as I read somewhere on the internet, what Dubliners have affectionately dubbed "the fag on a crag." My roommate and I were cracking up at that. I was online trying to figure out what another (unmarked) group of statues we saw there was all about. It turns out that the group of statues in question is called "The Victims" and is a memorial for (the sites were vague and differed) "torture victims" or "victims of war." What war I could not find, and it said that the actual form of the statue was up for interpretation. It was certainly eerie, whatever it was meant to be. Then we went to Oscar Wilde's house and Yeats' house and took pictures of plaques outside. You couldn't actually take a tour or anything. The group split once again after that and the remaining three of us grabbed some subway and walked back to the hotel. Tomorrow it has been decided that whoever wants to go to Catholic mass can meet at 8:45 in the hotel lobby but the rest of us who aren't Catholic and would like to sleep will meet everybody else in St. Stephen's Green by the Emmet statue at 11.