“Authentic Irish breakfast, only €7!”

“National Leprechaun museum, 700 meters!”

“Viking Splash Tours: Helmets Included!”

These are my first impressions of Dublin.

I’ve been chronicling my first impressions of Northern Ireland for the past two weeks, and the dominant emotion has been one difficult to put into words. The unnerving juxtaposition of rolling green fields, lackadaisical herds of cows, forty-foot walls, and barbed wire has colored nearly every landscape I have come across in the six counties that still belong to the United Kingdom.

Dublin, on the other hand… The sense of juxtaposition is still there. It’s just a very different sense.

This is the first part of the Irish island I’ve been to that caters to tourists at this scale. Upon disembarking from our bus, I immediately caught sight of three or four gift shops selling variations on the same theme. Not to mention the two men dressed in full leprechaun costumes dancing on the streets for money. Street performers lined the squares of Temple Bar, and sounds of music drifted from nearly every pub, varying from traditional Irish drinking songs to a disproportionate amount of Johnny Cash.

Temple Bar was the Ireland I had naively imagined while sitting at home waiting for June 28^th and daydreaming about the Emerald Isle.

At the same time, there’s something disturbing about finding your fantasies deliberately constructed exclusively for your viewing pleasure. At times, it felt like a real-life episode of The Truman Show. Was this whole part of town a set, constructed based on how I would react to it? Were these pubs and dance clubs and tourist halls and street performers all set up solely for my entertainment, and would they be dismantled on Saturday evening when I left? Certainly the locals had little need for a “Dublin Temple Bar Est. MDCCCXL” sweatshirt. (Reasonably priced, and which I am wearing as I type, for the record.)

Not all Dublin bore the tell-tale hallmarks of a movie set, however. Strolling through St. Stephen’s Green and watching the seagulls drift across the pond. Wandering through the center square of Trinity University and imagining what it would be like to attend classes in these pale gray cobblestone pieces of history. The weathered edifices of Dublin Castle, neatly tucked behind office buildings just off the beaten path, asserting its primogeniture on the same foundation it occupied in 1204. The college James Joyce attended, the house Oscar Wilde grew up in, the bridge Patrick Kavanagh wrote from, the theater WB Yeats commissioned. This is Ireland for its own sake, not for mine.

Full disclosure: I adored Temple Bar. It was refreshing and lovely to find myself back in a tourist area, particularly as the marches and protests currently taking place back in the North for the 12^th of July had been weighing on all our minds. Our “authentic” Irish pub food, if overpriced, was highly satisfactory, and I discovered a somewhat unnerving taste for black pudding. It’s something like a trip to a theme park: you know it’s not the way people live every day, but for an escape from reality, there’s nothing like it.

But there’s something to be said for the insider’s Dublin, the city of poets and playwrights, the back alleys and around-the-corner pubs. In that way, I consider Dublin a tale of two cities: the old and the new, the shadowed and the fluorescent.