Day 4: Dublin's Cathedrals and Parliament

Today we began our day by visiting the Irish parliament at Leinster House. Their parliament is called the Oireachtas. At the parliament we met with senator Mark Daly, who is the spokesperson on foreign affairs. We were given a tour of  the building and got to see the chamber room. Afterwards we stopped for lunch, and had open time to go to shops and walk around a shopping area.

We then walked to our next activity which was to see St. Patrick's Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral. At St. Patricks Cathedral we looked at all of the beautiful architecture and attention to detail throughout the building which was amazing. At Christ Church Cathedral we had a tour where we got a lot more detailed information about the building and got to see parts of the building that only tours see.  There was an 86 step spiral staircase up to the roof of the cathedral, and across the roof, up another 25 steps, was the bell room, where the bells are rung for the cathedral.  Dublin does not have regulations to when or when not to ring the bells so our tour guide let us ring the bells of the cathedral.

 Later during our seminar we discussed the importance of cathedrals in Europe and how they attract people from around the world and how they affect the local culture. We began to compare these cathedrals and their effects with cultural preservation in the United States, and we realized that in the United States we do not have cathedrals which we preserve simply because our country is not as old. We came to the conclusion that our national parks are like Europe's cathedrals in that we are preserving and protecting them. There were also differences between preserving and protecting these two different kinds of places that we came up with. We realized that preserving a product of a civilization (like a cathedral) is very different from preserving natural land (national parks) that has not been developed.  This led us to think about how the United States priorities on what to preserve are very different from countries in Europe.