Belfast

This weekend I went to Belfast, in Northern Ireland.  I didn't realize that we had crossed the boarder into a different country, until I noticed that the road signs had changed from being bilingual to simply English.  When we arrived at Belfast we had free time to explore the city.  We dumped our stuff of at the hostel and started walking around.  Our bus driver had told us that if we went to the top of a shopping center there was a great view of the city, so we set off to find the shopping center.  We found it and it was totally worth it!

We then had a very lovely dinner, where I tried mussels for the first time.  Slimy, yet satisfying!

Friday night we went with ESN (the club that I went to Galway with) on a pubcrawl throughout the city.  We had a lot of tequila, and it was a great night full of dancing.  At the last club they had dum dums and smarties in little bowls on all the tables and I kept stealing them, putting them in my wristlet,and then dancing up to all the ESN people and giving them away.  It was great craic.

Saturday we went on the Black Taxi tour through Belfast so that we could see the history, particularly of the troubles.  Although there has been a cease-fire for over ten years, there are still many social issues in Belfast.  This is most notable because there is a three mile long wall that blocks off the Catholic and Protestant parts of the city.  The wall is so tall, and the only way to get through is four gates that police close every night.  We got to see both sides of the wall, and looked at murals on each side.  Also, we signed the wall.

The ESN committee came up with a scavenger hunt for us to do, so we spent the rest of the day walking throughout the center finding some of the items. We also did some shopping in the amazing shopping center that we had visited the day before.

Sunday we left Belfast and explored more of Northern Ireland. We walked across the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, which is 75 feet in the air.  It was so beautiful, one of the most beautiful views I have seen so far.  At one point Adele and I were standing looking at the bridge, the Island, the water, the green hills and the cliffs and we could not believe how breathtaking it was.  She then had the idea to pull out her iPod and we shared the earbuds and listened to Liz on top of the world from the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack.  We both almost started crying. It was ridiculous and amazing. I'm actually listening to it right now as I type. *sigh*

Our next stop was the Giants Causeway.  According to legend, Finn McCool was an Irish giant who one day exchanged some words with a Scottish giant across the sea (13 miles away) and the Scottish giant wanted to fight him, but unfortunately was unable to swim. Finn McCool built a bridge out of stone from Ireland to Scotland, but building it made him too tired to fight, so he quickly ran back to Ireland, to his castle, and pretended to be a baby asleep in a cradle.  The Scottish giant came over, and thought "if this is how big the baby is, how big is the father" and ran back to Scotland, and Finn McCool destroyed part of the bridge.

Or, there was a shift in teutonic plates.

It was a lovely weekend, and below is the music Adele and I listened to if you would also like to have a slightly religious experience, although the pictures do not do Ireland justice.