July 4-5

So for more updates: the other day while we were riding on the bus I was sleeping in a very awkward position…very unnatural and the bus driver had to slam on his brakes and im sure you all know what comes next…yes I fell off my seat while asleep and fell flat on my face. It was a rude awakening to say the least. Yesterday we arrived in Dublin. I must say that I do prefer the country over the city. Dublin is nice and it does have character but it is a little dirty and not my favorite city. Saturday was a free day and I got up early and did a 10 mile run in Phoenix Park. Then we went to Trinity College where we saw the book of kells which is ancient scripture, some of the first recovered from Ireland I guess. It was so interesting and since I love art history I loved taking my time and reading about all the details. The book itself was made from calf skin (185 calves to be exact). Also it had coloring throughout the book and I learned that all of the different colors came from different parts of the world. The most expensive was a teal blue (called Lapis Lazuli) and it was mined from Afghanistan. The ink used was a brownish gold that was made up from crushed oak, apples, sulfate, and iron. It was all etched into the vellum by hand. There was also a lot of symbolism in the artwork. It had the books of Peter, James, John and Luke and they each had different artwork. One symbol that I found interesting was the snake. They used it a lot to symbolize Christ and the shedding of skin symbolized new life or birth, in other words the resurrection. The reason why I thought this was interesting is because in the bible Satan is often referred to or referenced to as a snake. After we looked at this ancient book we walked through a library that housed over 200,000 books from ancient scholars. The library was absolutely amazing. I couldn’t help but think about how, during those times, books took so long to make and required so much effort. I was amazed to think about how much work had gone into that library and all of the books that were in it. It was very cool.
We spent the rest of the day walking around and shopping. The shopping centers in Dublin are really nice and we had a good time walking around although our feet were killing by the end of the day. We also found a street performer who I am pretty sure was either mentally ill or on drugs. He was pretending to be Michael Jackson but from the picture that I have included you can see that he didn’t pull it off very well. People were staring not because he was good but because they were so confused. For dinner we went to a pub and then later that night we thought that we needed to have a dance party in our room. It was fabulous. We had an audience outside our window. It was a good day.
Today (Sunday) we went to church which was about an hour walk. The ward was funny because other than our group, there were maybe 15 people there. It was very small. But church was good and later that night we put on a fireside for the youth in the stake. We had three people speak and then also a few of us girls sang and we had refreshments after. It was fun to get to know some of the locals and talk with them. One thing that I remember thinking while there is that while we are in completely different parts of the world and our cultures are very diverse, it was comforting to share something in common. We all had the same belief and it was nice to see that that was the same all the way over here across the world.
Also something funny as a side note… it has been raining non stop the last week (or at least it seems like it) and I was informed today that they have had record sun while we have been here. HAHAHAHA. What a joke.