There are 14 bronze plaques on the streets of Dublin that identify a place where Leopold Bloom visits in Joyce’s Ulysses. The plaques exist physically in place, but also signify a fictive place. As we left the Archeology Museum, I cam me across one of these bronze plaques. On our free day, Sara and I meticulously planned a day that followed the tracks of Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom–a Ulysses pilgrimage. We followed the footsteps of Daedalus in Sandycove, Sandymount, and Dalkey, pretending to dive into the Forty Foot, climbing up the Martello Tower, and walking into eternity on the Strand.

Later in the afternoon, we followed the steps of Bloom in the city. We bought lemon soap at Sweny’s Chemist on Lincoln Place, enjoyed gorgonzola sandwiches and burgundy at Davy Byrne’s (the combination does not complement one another by the way), and searched for a racy novel around Merchant’s Arch (aka. our own version of Ulysses). After our 13 miles of walking it was nice to relax at the Oval Bar for dinner (also mentioned in the novel).

We ended the night at an art and poetry party complete with swing dancing and big band music (not quite Edwardian, but still fun). One of my favorite parts of the evening was having a poem written for me. A poet was sitting at a typewriter with a sign that read “Fresh Poems.” After telling the poet about my day, he wrote a poem in about 15 minutes that perfectly captured my experience of Dublin and the concept of place. Here are the first lines of the poem: “Steps followed around a city / As though it were a map, / As though streets can hold stories / Steeped into the brick.”