Frescoes of Blooms Hotel

More famous for its façades than for its certainly respectable services, the Bloom Hotel is a completely unplanned stop on our itinerary. For those who might not know, Dublin is as inseparable from its Guinness beer as it is from its legendary Irish writers. Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Seamus Heaney—these are just some of the names that echo through the city’s streets. But where are we going with this? Well, if you look up at this hotel’s colorful walls, you’ll notice some of the characters from Ulysses, a renowned novel by James Joyce. An authentic literary monument—containing no less than a thousand pages—this book recounts the adventures of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin in only one day: the 16th of June 1904. Through eighteen episodes, each with its own distinct style and tone, the Irish writer uses the everyday lives of his two main characters to explore the meaning of life and human experience—through death, life, art, sex, religion, and more. With no clear beginning or end, Ulysses is a complex work that asks readers to accept that they won’t always understand what they’re reading. In fact, they may not understand anything at all, as Joyce uses elaborate vocabulary to create his world full of extraordinary and stylistic inventiveness. In the Irish capital, every June 16 marks “Bloomsday,” a day of celebration where devoted Joyce fans, dressed in period costumes, take part in readings, performances, and reenactments of fictional events from Ulysses. A way to immerse yourself in the novel’s universe—without having to read all 265,000 words of it.