Northern Ireland

On October 29th (Thursday) we departed the PLH at 8am to start our journey to Northern Ireland.  It was a 4 hour bus ride to Derry, the destination for our first night.  We got there late...as usual.  Our first activity was an amazing lunch at a local restaurant.  It was amazing to actually have a decent meal for once.  It even included dessert!  It pretty much made up for the 4 hour bus ride that we had just endured.  Once we were done with our meal we met up with Martin who was to give us a walking tour of the city of Derry (or Londonderry, whichever you prefer).  It began by walking the still intact walls around Derry.  We got a great explanation of the history of the wall and of Derry itself.  Until about 15 years ago, no one was able to walk on the walls, but it is now open to the public.  (A sign of their change and growth)  I'm not going to explain the whole history of Northern Ireland but basically England came into Ireland, took over, and after a war they decided to give it all back except for 6 of the Northern counties which now make up Northern Ireland and is still part of the U.K. today.  Derry was no exception from this influence, it was renamed Londonderry by England and they are still trying to legally change it back to Derry.  So anyway, we got a insight of the town and their troubles.  After we had completed walking along the wall we descended to the Bogside which was the Catholic side of the wall.  In this neighborhood was where Bloody Sunday occurred and 14 people were killed during a civil rights march.  Now there are several murals at home in this neighborhood to commemorate this event, including a memorial statue to the 14 dead.  

The next day we went to the museum in Derry about Bloody Sunday.  The guy who runs it is actually the brother of one of the people killed on Bloody Sunday.  He told us all about his brother and it was really hard to hear.  The museum was very interesting and a very good learning tool for Northern Ireland and their troubles.  After the museum we packed up and headed out on our next activity.  Our next stopped just so happened to be the Old Bushmill Distillery.  Planned excursion to a whiskey distillery?  Alright.  We had the best tour guide ever!  He actually made me wish that I liked drinking whiskey.  The tour was also better than the Guinness one hands down.  So note that.  After our tour we were able to have a free whiskey drink.  I chose the Hot Toddy...hoping that it would hide the whiskey a little bit.  It was better but I'm still no whiskey drinker.  After our tour our next stop was at Giants C

auseway.  It's basically just another beautiful landscape...what's new :P  The myth is that the giants of Ireland and Scotland wanted to fight so they built a road between the two and then one ran away, causing the path to break away.  It is made up of millions of hexagonal shaped stones.  The real version?  Volcanoes.  It's basically a big jungle gym and you better not fall off!  When we went it was raining...go figure..and so it was a little scary.  When we were thoroughly wet and cranky and departed to our hostel in Belfast.  

Saturday morning in Belfast we went on a bus tour of the city.  This was really interesting, and again we got to learn all about the history of the city and Northern Ireland.  Some of the stops of the tour was where the Titanic was built, Stormont Parliament, and a ton of murals.  The tour lasted about 3ish hours and then we had the rest of the day to ourselves.  The murals were absolutely the most interesting thing about Northern Ireland.  You could definitely tell what kind of neighborhood it was by the murals depicted.  Everything there is just so out in the open, I was actually expecting for them to be pretty closed lipped about it.  But I guess this is why they have made such great change.  Although they still have a ways to go.  There was a corner, I think called "Freedom Corner," where there were murals but they were world murals instead.  They depicted crises and issues throughout the world.  So that was also really cool to see and apparently those change every now and again.  So after our tour ended most of us went to St. George's Market near downtown.  There was a lot of good food and some other shopping.  We all had a good lunch there (including crepes!) and then roamed around downtown on our own.  The city hall was unique because right next to it was a ferris wheel.  Random?  But hey, it helped us navigate ourselves around town, so I guess there's a purpose.  One thing that we noticed about Belfast was that it looked incredibly like London.  The ferris wheel (the London Eye), statues of Queen Victoria everywhere, style of buildings, a huge clock tower (Big Ben).  So the presence of England was obvious in Belfast.  Derry didn't give that impression hardly at all.  It just seemed like a cute little city (excluding all of the history and murals, downtown was pretty picturesque).  A hassle that we ran into in Northern Ireland was having to change money to pounds...not fun.  But a lot of things were actually cheaper in Northern Ireland than the Republic of Ireland which was weird.  Oh, another thing that was mentioned on our tour was how a citizen of Northern Ireland could have either an Irish passport or a British passport or both.  Talk about an identity crisis!  

Halloween in Belfast was very interesting.  We all threw some costumes together at the last minute and walked around town.  Some of the costumes that we saw were pretty intense.  And everyone who was out had a costume on.  Apparently one of the biggest Halloween celebrations in the world is in Derry.  Too bad we missed out on that.  But Belfast was very fun and we met a lot of interesting characters.  I was even proposed to by a Irishman...  Sunday morning we departed Belfast and started our journey back to Galway.  After 4 hours of driving we reached Strokestown House and Famine Museum.  The house belonged to a landlord back in the day and we learned about the tenant/landlord relationship and what life was like for the landlord.  After the tour of the house we went through the Famine Museum.  It was cool because it contained documents between the tenant and landlord that showed their relationship at that time.  At this point of our excursion, however, I had about no attention span left and so did not learn a whole lot here.  I feel bad because it is a huge part of Irish history.  But what can you do?  Anyway, when we were done we drove another 2ish hours back to the PLH.

I had a great time in Northern Ireland and feel very privileged that I was able to visit and learn more about it.  We had several people tell us that they love when people come and visit and learn about them.  It means that they no longer consider Northern Ireland a dangerous place with bombs flying everywhere.  They feel that they are making great strides in change and are happy to see it.  I now have a new understanding of Northern Ireland.  Before coming to Ireland, really the only thing I heard about it was the Troubles.  Now I know that there is much more to it then crazy people just throwing bombs around.  I hope that everyone can learn more about it and take a good look and what's going on there.