Northern Ireland: Giant Causeways, Ferris Wheels and a divided world

This weekend was an arranged trip through Arcadia to Belfast in Northern Ireland. It's at the opposite end of the country from Galway so we took a bus early Friday morning and arrived in the late afternoon (it was about a 6 hour drive with a lunch break) Going to Northern Ireland is like traveling to another country, which you kind of are since it is part of the UK.

There are so many differences between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland it's hard to know where to start. So let me go through the whole weekend and then I'll touch back on some of the history and conflict in the area, because it's actually pretty fascinating.

Friday night we were tired from the long bus ride, so we went to an arranged dinner at a hotel and then decided to just wander around the center of the city a bit. Belfast is a fairly big city, at least bigger than Galway. It's very much like London because of the British colonisation. We found the city hall, which is at the center of the city and very big and empowering. In front of it there was a Ferris wheel, kind of like the London Eye. We went on it and got an amazing view of the city at night. From the Ferris wheel we saw a neat lit up blue dome. After we got off we went to check it out, turns out it was a mall of all things. But since we weren't sure where else to shop, and clothes are much cheaper here, we wandered around the mall for a little while. Then we went to the movies (again much cheaper) and saw Confessions of a Shopaholic. It was pretty good, but not up to par with the book. (But when is a movie better than the book really?)

Saturday we ate breakfast at the hostel, oh and speaking of the hostel I shared a room with NINETEEN other girls. It was an experience to say the least. They were also on the trip through Arcadia but were studying in other parts of Ireland, including Limerick, Cork and Dublin. Speaking of other students I ran into an old friend from high school who is studying in Cork. Some of you may know him, a Mr. Ross Brown! It was really funny to see him there, and it just makes you realize how small the world really is. I got his number so maybe if I visit Cork I
ll give him a call and he can show me around.

Back to Saturday. We went to the Giant's Causeway which is land that juts out into the sea and is made up of interlocking basalt columns. The columns are perfect hexagons and octagons and it looks like it was not created naturally. According to the legend the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) built the causeway to walk to Scotland to fight his Scottish counterpart Benandonner. Scotland is supposed to be just barely visible from the causeway on a clear day and while it was a pretty nice day out, it was a bit too foggy in the early morning to see it. The causeway was breathtakingly beautiful. It is currently one of my favorite places in Ireland. We climbed all the way up to the top and looking out at the cliffs and brilliantly blue sea was amazing, and if you turned around in the other direction you could see the Irish country side for miles upon miles. And the sun came out for quite some time, which was AWESOME.

After we got back from the causeway I went with my friends Courtney, Adrienne and Andy to wander around the city again. We got pictures of the shipyard where the Titanic was built and some of a big cermic fish statue near the harbor. The England v. Ireland rigby game was on so we caught the middle of that (Ireland WON!) Before the game ended we had to leave to go to dinner at a restaurant named the Edge, which was along the water. It was really pretty and the food was very good. After dinner it was late and everyone was tired from a long day of walking around so my friends and I went to bed early (me a little later than everyone else since the Cork girls decided to have a pregame party in the hostel room before going out).

Sunday we had a presentation on the murals in Belfast. It was so early in the morning and everyone was dreading it, but the man who did the presentation did a great job and it turned out to be really interesting. The murals are all part of the divide in N. Ireland between the Unionists, who are mostly Protestant, and the Nationalists, who are mainly Catholic. The murals are extremely political showing the views from both sides. The Nationalists want N. Ireland to unite with the Republic of Ireland and become free from all British, and thus colonial, rule. But the Unionists want N. Ireland to remain a part of the UK. To say that the sides don't get along would be an understatement. This conflict has caused decades of strife and violence across Northern Ireland, and still to this day the divide and violence remains.

After the presentation we went on a bus tour to see first hand how badly the land is divided and how vivid the murals are. They are actually quite shocking, especially the Unionist ones. They display men with guns in masks and are not shy about projecting the Unionist's hate for Nationalists and vice versa (I'll show pictures below). Apart from the murals the most shocking parts of the areas we were in was the fences. The poorer the neighborhood the worst the divide is, so the whole city was not marred by fences, but many of the parts we rode through were. The most incredible is a wall that divides two roads -- Falls Road and Shankill Road. Falls Road is where Protestants live and Shankill Road is where Catholics live. The eight-mile wall divides them from one another with barbed wire at the top. It was just incredible to see, especially because I am learning about identity and nationality in Ireland in my geography class and we did many lessons on the divide of nationality in N. Ireland. They even still use the pound and the buildings are very British looking. Our bus driver also told us there are separate buses and taxis for Protestants and Catholics. Separate schools also dot the area and our professor had told us about an instance where a girl has to walked to a Catholic school through a Protestant neighborhood and was harassed so badly that she had to be escorted to school by a police officer.

However, the conflict really isn't driven by religion. It is more political, but it just tends to turn out that Unionists and Protestants and Nationalists are Catholics.

It was a pretty sobering end to the trip, but amazing to see. It is sad that such a divide still exists there and not much can be done to stop the conflict. It is not as bad as it once was and people are trying to devise a way to maintain peace, but with such strong sides being take it is hard to find a common middle ground.

** This will probably be my last post for about a week. I leave for Portugal Wednesday morning and will return late Saturday night. So expect a post about the trip over the weekend. I can't wait for some fun in the sun!

Unionist mural

They're not all about Ireland ...