Goth tourist in Dublin

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent the first weekend of September in Dublin.

Things I saw

I went to two art museums, the National Gallery of Ireland and The Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery. Both were exquisite and had free entry. Nothing extremely goth art was on display, so I am not going to write about them much. All I'll say is that if you are in Dublin, they are extremely nice places to spend a couple of hours.

Another not particularly goth or gloomy place to visit but in which I had a great time was Teeling Whiskey Distillery. They arrange tours and it is the only working whiskey distillery in Dublin.

In these huge tanks water leaves alcohol. They all had names and the liquid goes through from the biggest to the smallest. There are three copper ladies in a row.

Rebecca on the right can hold 9 000 liters. She is the smallest one. If I remember correctly the biggest of the sisters has the capacity of 15 000 liters or more.

A tad more goth-y or at least more geeky place to visit would be the old library of The Trinity College. The quality of photos is awful due to lighting conditions (to preserve old books). One could photograph only in The Long Room. If you think there is something familiar in this place, it might be because you have seen its doppelganger in the movie Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones.

They have around 200 000 books in this library and many of them are extremely valuable first editions. The most priced book of this library is the Book of Kells, It was written and drawn around year 800 and it contains the four Gospels. The most intriguing thing about it are the marvelous drawn decorations. Underneath this Long Room in the photos is a huge exhibition area dedicated solely to the Book of Kells. 

The most goth tourist attraction I found on a 48 hour trip was Marsh's Library. They have many ghost stories and other peculiar and sometimes morbid things on display. Among them a copy of Jonathan Swift's dear friend's skull. No photos are allowed to take in the library, so alas, I have nothing to show. They do have great photos and information on their website, though.

The Marsh's Library has stayed pretty much the same for 300 years and is an almost pristine example of 18th century library. James Joyce, Jonathan Swift and Bram Stoker have all visited it and used its services. The library still has the chair Mr. Stoker rested his bum on while he read about witchcraft!

One thing particular makes this place the gothiest place I visited and it is because their history and that they made a small comic book about the weirdest tales. It was created by John Rooney, the illustrator, and Julie Burke, who is the Education and Outreach Officer of the Marsh's Library.

I bought a copy and I must say it is great! I adore the style of the illustrator. All incidents or stories consist of a one picture and a text box but they are really amusing and sometimes a bit gross. My favorite story is about a 3500 years old mummy that was found in a cupboard at the library in 1888. Nobody knows how it ended up there!

You can read this small treasure online, if you want to, though I must say that buying it for mere 2 euros for a physical copy is a very good deal. They also have beautiful photos of details of their collection on Pinterest.

Prospects on shopping

In the post before the trip I wrote that I would like to go to goth clothing shops, if possible. There were a couple of alternative fashion stores in the Temple Bar area. They were nice but they mostly sold rock, psycho-billy etc. styles so I end up leaving without any purchases.

Obviously for those interested in Celtic myths, jewelry, and things related the Green Island is a heaven. Celtic necklaces are beautiful but not my style anymore, so no products came to my possession. What I really wanted to have was a selection of animal themed sticky notes. The bat and the dodo are my favorites.

 The sticky notes were sold in the shop of the National Gallery of Ireland. It contains 8 different animals in 8 different sticky note piles and it costed about 12 euro.

From an Irish gift shop called Old World New I found this beautiful thing. "Wolf's Bane. Potion No. 5. Slightly bitter potion to take the edge off your Lycanthropy. Drink at your own risk."

I am not sure if one can actually use it and store some liquid in it. The bottleneck is really small and it would be a pain in the ass to try to clean it after usage. No matter, it looks gorgeous by my window, next to a candelabra I found at a flea market last summer.

Next up: Creepy Reads Review after a long pause!

Road trip: Eastern Finland, pretty cafes and natural beauty

This post is about the first half of the road trip I was on last week. As shown on a previous post, me and my other road tripper (who wishes to stay more or less anonymous and I am going to respect that) drove to the municipality of Mänttä-Vilppula. After the Gösta art museum and its amazing content, we headed towards Kuopio.

Kuopio is the capital of the province called Northern Savonia (Pohjois-Savo). It is a large area of the Eastern Finland. We do not really talk about "Middle Finland", it is always either west or east. :D Especially the Eastern Finland has a disturbing amount of lakes. Of Nortern Savonia's area 17,7% is inland water, in Southern Savonia 26,6%.

It is fair to say that the scenery was beautiful. These photos are not modified in any way. They are from a small pond and a lake on our route. We needed a break from driving so we stopped at the first "break place" we saw. there are many places to take a break beside the roads of Finland.

 The first two photos are from the small pond. It was so still the pond acted as a perfect mirror.

This third photo from the bigger lake makes me understand, why some painters from 18th and 19th century wanted to paint solely clouds.

To balance this overexposure of natural beauty, here is me causing havoc in a lake. Notice how a city person can not let go of her phone even when in water.

When we reached Kuopio, we stayed at friends' place. These two too are not so interested of featuring themselves in my blog, so no much other material about them. You may wonder, are Finnish people reluctant to appear in public, or am I actually just a weirdo without friends. Well, at least you can see that the photos taken from a moving vehicle are taken from the passenger seat, not behind the wheel. ;)

Even though Finland has a small population, there are distinguishable differences between eastern and western areas. East being next to Russia, has more Russian influenced cuisine. More cream, more stews etc. We did not go and eat anything really traditional, but we did go to the Moomin Pancake House in Kuopio. They had a huge selection of sweet and salty pancakes and the decoration was themed with the Moomins.

Moomins are fairy tale characters created by Swedish-speaking Finn Tove Jansson and they are known in many countries. They are super popular in Japan, for example.

I had a salty pancake with reindeer meat and my rather anonymous companion had cold smoked salmon pancake. Delicious!

In the photos are also shown a glimpse of the menu, and decor. the right upper corner is of a lamp they had. All lamps had Moomin decorations and yes, those are sold to ordinary folk too. In the lamp one of the main characters called Moomintroll is painting. Underneath him is Little My a really tiny yet feisty girl. Notice she is only just bigger than an ant next to her.

Finland got its independence 1917 and if I exaggerate a bit, before that it was a vast land area between Sweden and Russia. Both Russian and Swedish throne were interested to claim that area and during the Middle Ages the most common way was to ride to the borderlands and convert the humans who might be inhabiting the areas. That is why the Eastern Finland has a longer history with Eastern Orthodox Church. Lutheran church arrived from the west.

In Kuopio you can visit the Orthodox Church Museum of Finland - RIISA. As they sum up on their webpage: they continue the purpose of the Museum of Antiquities founded in the Valamo Monastery in 1911 by preserving, studying, and displaying the cultural heritage of the Orthodox church.

The photos show the bell tower outside the museum and church, the entrance to the museum and church, a detail of a red carpet-like religious equipment, and some holy texts and other equipment needed in a sermon.

It was very interesting to visit this museum, since it is an awful long time since I was in secondary school and was educated on religions. Plus, most of Finns have been christened to Lutheran church so they only teach cultural basics about the other church in school, unless you are orthodox yourself.

Kuopio is a good city for tourists, the centre is compact, it is an old city so the architecture is pretty, and there are several museums (12 to be precise!) and other ways to pass one's time. I am a museum person myself, so on my list were Kuopio Art Museum and Kuopio Natural History Museum.

If you check the webpages of the museums you will notice that the language options are Finnish, English and Russian. Finland has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish but in Eastern Finland the amount of Swedish-speaking Finns is much smaller (compared to coastline area) and the amount of tourists and immigrants from Russia is more significant. More fun facts about Finland's languages in the next post! Whether you like it or not.

In this photo collage frim the museum of natural history you can see one of the exhibition areas. It is a winter scenery with birches. On the walls are boxes where are animals. The boxes depict the natural environment and behavior of the animals during winter. That means there are scenes with taxidermy animals and information boards next to them. Other two are of two bears arguing over honey, and a Saimaa ringed seal with its offspring. They only live in a small area of Saimaa in Finland.

I mentioned in the previous post that despite not reaching Lapland, we did drive trough an area where reindeer are herded. Those areas are marked and on roads you will see signs warning about reindeer. They are half tamed animals so they might not necessarily be aware of cars and a collision with one will be ugly. More fun facts about the dangers of wildlife in Finland in the next post!

To conclude this post, some tourist photos of the center of Kuopio, featuring art, little design shops and a really nice cafe we went to. Their decor was mostly from small local designers and even though it is not straight up goth, there are elements you could easily incorporate to romantic goth style, or the modern witch style. The name of this cafe was Kahvila Kaneli, which means Cafe Cinnamon. It is situated close to the market square, on a nearby street.

In the photos you can see the outside of the cafe. They have a lot of green plants and it really made the place extra nice and homey. That whole day had short but violent rain showers interrupting our trotting around the city of Kuopio. I do not know if you notice straight away, but in the outside pic the ground is completely wet and so are the tables and stools. We actually ended up going to Cafe Cinnamon by accident, because we had no umbrellas with us and we were in front of this cafe when it started raining.

I have to say I was super pleased we went there, because the place was awesome! The cafe had two floors, here is a view from the upper level. As you can see the decor is lovely romantic with a dash of rustic touch.

Last but not least, me ready to attack my hot chocolate. They had a gorgeous selection of salty and sweet pastry products but unfortunately we had just eaten our breakfast so there was no room for food.

2014 Kuopio ordered seven sculptures by artist Pekka Kauhanen. The statues are positioned in the centre area. In the photos you can see Oksapoika, which means a "branch boy" or a "twig boy".

Kauhanen is from the Savonia area and his works are described as humorous and that they express especially Savonian humor. It is hard to describe, but Savonian humor, compared to the humor Finns in west areas have, is a touch more twisted. It has a dash of horseplay in it but that it is not maleficent, a Savonian bloke has a good heart.

The yellow building is the old market hall of Kuopio. It is filled with little shops of delicacies. Meat, bread candy, etc and also local design and crafts.

Next up: the world's oldest (and possibly creepiest) diving suit and other wonders of Finland!

Picturesque greetings from New York!

I am currently in New York City on a holiday and I wanted to share some of the things I've seen so far. I will do more posts about art I'll see here but these are some goth-y or pretty things I've seen so far!

These remains of a sticker graffiti are super cute, so sad that we do not know how it continued! Altough I quite like the combination now, with the reading person spray painted through a template.

 Yesterday I visited The Merchant's House Museum. It is a Row House from the 19th century and it is perfectly preserved with all furniture, clothes etc. Victorian aesthetics are close to many a goths heart.

Here is another picture, showing one of the gowns the lady of the house owned.

Enjoy your weekend, I am now off to explore NYC some more!

Gothic Art in Spotlight: art and design out of old naval mines

A bit before the Holidays I took a day trip to Tallinn, Estonia. There I visited art exhibitions by KUMU, the art museum of Estonia. Most of the exhibitions are of coarse in the building on KUMU but there was also a small exhibition presenting works of sculptor Mati Karmin at the old terminal of the Tallinn Airport. According to the webpage of KUMU, the exhibition is open till 5th of May 2015. So, if you happen to visit Tallinn before that, you have an excellent opportunity to see these works made out of old naval mines yourself! The place is right next to the Airport and less than a 20 minute bus trip from the center of Tallinn.

The baby carriage and an armchair

 I must admit I was a bit puzzled by the fact, that instead of being in the exhibition area, these two were just parked in a corridor. Maybe they were renovating the floor in the exhibition room, I don't know.

Close-up, look at the little toys for toddlers!

What is this about then? The project is about making objects of art and design out of old army equipment. The artist who started the whole project, Karmin, is a very notorious and distinguished Estonian artist, who has made many monumental sculptures since the eighties and the latest was finished 2012. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in Estonia, Hungary and Finland.

The armchair from the front.

I saw a fireplace, three chairs and the baby carriage. In their webpage you can see they make all kinds of other things too, for example a toilet, a grill oven, a coffee table, and a bathtub!

A fireplace, I presume.

I think these design objects are marvelous, they are fun but also constantly remind what the used material was actually for; destroying submarines and other vessels during war.

20's accessories in KUMU

This no longer is related to naval mines but I also saw an exhibition in KUMU of 20's fashion and art déco, I am sure some of you love vintage styles and might be interested of this exhibition. It is open till 18th of January.

DIY Bookish Holiday Decorations

I saw a nice DIY idea for Christmas ornaments in a magazine and decided to try it. The ornaments are instantly more goth-y if one uses black ornaments, like I did, to begin with and chooses the right text.

I did not have the heart to start to shred a novella of Edgar Allan Poe or another dear horror story and I would not advise people to destroy their favorite books. Instead it is wiser to buy a pocket book from a flea market. Or use some disgusting novel one has received as a present. An instruction manual of some apparatus can be a fun choice too.

I bought this book and I chose it for two reasons. It costed 1 euro and even though it is not a goth-y novel, there are delicious sentences like "I think she is a Russian prostitute" and "He is a genuine psycho", which can be hilarious if other people start to examine my ornaments too closely.

What you need:
- old Christmas ornaments, preferably a dark color, no patterns or figures
- glue
- a book you are willing to rip into parts, or any printed text
- black glitter glue
- clear varnish

First clip or rip parts of a page. You do not have to try to get whole sentences or anything but it is nice is one can read a few words here and there.

Glue them on the ornaments in a formation that pleases your eye. Add black glitter glue, especially if you have goofed some part of the previous phase, for example the paper is wrinkled or the glue has smudged the edges. Black glitter is also added to places that you feel it fits.

If you like, in the end you can gently coat the ornaments with clear varnish. It might keep the paper on the ornaments better but the ink can start to run if you are not careful. Choosing the right kind of varnish is important.

I of coarse could not follow my own instructions because I forgot to make sure I actually had glue that had not mysteriously dried up. I used the varnish from a craft store as a substitute and it work quite well. Of coarse the coating became a bit "rough" but it does not bother me much.

When you have finished an ornament it is good to hang it somewhere so that the surface can dry up. I used one of those thingies that are usually used to dry laundry.

Happy Holidays to you all!

CorpGoth's Mid-Month Status Report: Work space

It is the middle of the month so Trystan From This Is CorpGoth has asked people to show how they goth up their work place, cubicle or other. Unfortunately my 'work place' is in my home because I am studying and you can't really go and decorate a computer in the university's computer class or anything. So I do not have that need to decorate and make myself and my personality visible at some other place like in the office. My personal stuff is all around me every second. :)

This framed postcard used to be at the work table, now it's next to bed.

I still wanted to participate with my status report. My work area is actually not that goth-y because I am terribly untidy when I am studying and there is no room. Everywhere lay books and old coffee cups and since I do not have an area to put my make up stuff, they are also crowding on the table! Still here is a small sneak a peek of the gothier things.

Above you can see my old jewelery box and on top of that is the old march hare whose skull I cleaned a year and a bit ago.

Le Fanu's famous horror stories. I have not yet started to read them but I am planning to start them today. Underneath are some dictionaries and other stuff.

Here you can see how after the 'work area' there is just bunch of stuff. The Asian ladies are my small travel make up bag I got from my mother. Behind them peeks a coffee cup from the morning.

Thanks for reading and do check Trystan's and other participants' posts too!

Home decor from Oslo, suitable for gothic taste

I was browsing through the internet and remembered a shop I saw in Oslo when I visited that tremendously pretty city during the summer. The shop is called Milla Boutique and they have all kinds of things from forks to art prints and steampunk-ish installations.

Unfortunately I could not afford all those pretty things I saw in the shop and I think the shop itself had much more objects that might interest a goth than what they have on the webpage.

Still, here are my favorites from their webpage, which seems to be only in Norwegian:

Link to the store

I want that so bad. Although there were other installations too, with electricity and rodents and stuff that I liked more.

Link to the sotre

Link to the store

I doubt they post products to other countries but if you visit Oslo, this is a really great store to visit. And no, I have not got any sponsor money from them. :) I just really like some of their products that hit my aesthetic spot.