April 15, 2012:

In the morning, we divided up the last of the books from the book buffet and hit the streets of Dublin with plenty of release fodder. The Dublin team had stickers for us to put in the books we released during the flash mob. I released James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We headed over to do a flash mob, dropping books along the way. I’ve never been part of a flash mob before. What we did is mill about by a mall and when a whistle was blown, we all put on funny Irish hats and froze in a pose, reading a book. Some people walked by me and casually said “Oh, a flash mob” like you see one every day LOL! When the whistle was blown again, we dropped our books and walked away. Except we were in the middle of a traffic triangle and there was no WALK so we couldn’t really walk away. We stood around taking photos of the books and making sure each had a post-it. And then we had to assemble and split into groups for the various scavenger hunts.

Miss-Efficiency and I had a date to go snarfing through Dublin together. We chose the long scavenger hunt and basically used it for snarf-finding. Every time we broke away from the group to snarf something, we ended up back with the group again. So we just stuck with them the whole time and didn’t fill out a single scavenger hunt answer. The hunt took us all around the city on this side of the river and definitely showed us parts I never would have noticed on my own. I also properly identified a Magpie for others in my group, having asked an older woman on the Doctor Who tour what that striking black & white bird was that I saw a few times around Cardiff.

Dublin: City of Literature

Famine Sculpture

Magpie

I managed to pop into a couple stores (including a bookstore) and bought a few Christmas gifts. And we found a whole bunch of snarfs. I also released about a dozen books during the day, some nicely theme released and all in bags, which is good because it rained mid-day! At Trinity, there was a revolving sculpture that was packed full of BookCrossing books from various others who had come by! I added The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to it and that was pocked out by someone before the sculpture even rotated around for me to take a photo of the release!

Release in a tree

Release in a revolving sculpture

Release at a pub

It started raining, so we ducked into “Al’s Stage Door Cafe” for lunch. It was near the theatre district and obviously gets a lot customers after my own heart judging by the sexylovelyartistic NSFW photo of a naked man hanging over the table I sat at.

We also saw a homeless man sitting against a wall reading a BookCrossing book he had picked up (Free! sticker still on the cover). The bookstore owner across the way who also saw got a kick out of it. I’m glad we could brighten the guy’s day! I also fangirled some flying buttresses pretty hard *G*

After the hunt, Miss-E and I walked around some more by our hotel, looking for snarfs. I had left Eeyore there that morning, so it was nice to go back and get him for proper snarf photos. We didn’t really find very many though. So we quit early but took a photo by a snarf to send to WR!

I spent the rest of the afternoon writing postcards to friends/family/coworkers.

We trekked over to the Long Stone Pub for a pub quiz–best place to have one, I think! My team, the Wilde Bunch, did awesome and came in first with a perfect score during the BookCrossing round. But the Irish round killed us. So we ended up in a very respectable 5th place overall. The team sitting next to us won the whole thing. The tables were served huge platters of fries, onion rings, and chicken wings. They were super nice and asked if I wanted some vegetarian onion rings (I said yes, of course). They returned with a HUGE tray of just fries and onion rings just as everyone else had had just about as much as they wanted from the other tray. LOL Very nummy and thoughtful.

What a great way to end the Dublin BookCrossing Convention!