Belfast, Ireland, Sat 14 June 2008

Arrived about midday in Belfast. Met up with Sam who I used to work with at Intergen and who'd come up from Dublin to catch up with me.

We decided the first thing to do would be a black cab tour of the city. The cabbie took us around the murals that were scattered through the city and told us all about the history of Belfast and the Troubles. It was incredibly interesting, I learned a lot about the history, the people, the murals and their meaning. The most interesting mural was of a gunman who seems to be pointing at you no matter where you are standing to look at it, very scary.

It amazed me that the two areas - Loyalists (Protestants) & Republicans (Catholics) is still so prominent. The two main areas - Shankill Road and Falls Road have a tall wall with metal netting running between them and gates which still automatically shut at night. These walls are also known as the Peace Lines . People still occasionally throw things over the wall between the two sides (this was obvious from the amount of glass around) and there are cages on one side to protect the houses from these projectiles. We were allowed to write on the wall with the hundreds of other people.

At the end of the tour our guide dropped us at a famous pub in Belfast, the Crown Saloon. It was such a cool pub! It had little booths (called Snugs) that were fully enclosed with little doors and cool features like stained glass windows, mosaics and gas lamps. The booths also have little doorbells that used to be used to ring the waitress but they don't work anymore. The food was good too, I had a Steak & Guiness Pie. Tasty! Of course I also decided to try the local whiskey - Bushmills. It's a lot weaker than Scotch so was very easy to drink straight. The bar has had it's fair share of history since it's opposite the Europa Hotel which used to get bombed constantly so the pub took a few hits too.

After lunch we had a wonder through the city and checked out a few of the sights, the clock tower (which is apparently on a lean, but I never noticed), the pier with the fish statue, and cathedral square. The cathedral had a crazy huge spike coming out of it.

After that we realised we'd pretty much seen all of Belfast... it really didn't take that long :) So I decided I was definitely going to go on the Giants Causeway tour on the Sunday and managed to convince Sam to go too even though he'd already been before.

Headed out to the pubs for the night and met up with Paul, one of the Belfast EPiServer partner people I met in Sweden. It was great to have a local to take us to the best pubs. Tried a hot whiskey at one of them, which I didn't actually like, tasted like a whiskey & hot lemon drink. Little strange. No live bands which was disappointing but we did somehow find ourselves in a Swedish pub. So an Irish pub in Sweden and a Swedish pub in Ireland! Weird, hehe.

All the pubs shut up about 1 so headed back to the hostel and found a good samaritan van on the way serving coffee and chocolate... yay!