One of the real treats at the bed-and-breakfast we’re staying at is being made to order healthy breakfasts that we will get today and tomorrow. It was good vegetarian food with fresh juices, homemade muesli and something called dippy eggs and soldiers, which turns out to be soft- boiled eggs with strips of toast to dip in, apparently a good childhood comfort food in Ireland. There was also home-baked Irish soda, bread, and potato bread. And beautiful jam. We ate until we were so full and had a little bit of bread to take along for later.
We needed to be fortified because the rain had settled in in a very steady manner.
We knew we were going to have to get bus tickets to go from Belfast to Dublin but, as Patti tried to get them online, it didn’t seem to work to buy them. Luckily, we were a five minute walk to the bus station. At the ticket counter, the nice man, explained all the tickets were sold out until 11 o’clock the next day. That was really going to put a cramp in our plans. However, he said twinkle in his eye, if we went ahead and bought a ticket for 11 and then the next day came back and talked to him, he would get us on the 9 AM bus. His name was Martin and he was such a kind soul.
We continued on our way to what is known as a Black Taxi Tour focusing on “The Troubles”. Northern Ireland, and especially Belfast, was really divided in a long history between the Protestants who were very loyal to England and the royal family, and the Catholics, who were in support of unification with the Irish Republic, which is the southern part of Ireland. From 1969 to 1998 there was an ongoing bloody battle between members of these two groups. It included sometimes rioting, long fighting in the streets, people being shot in their homes and drive by shootings, and also lots and lots of bombs. We went by the hotel, the Europa, which was the most bombed hotel in all of Europe having been bombed 35 times.
During the time of The Troubles on the conflicts every thing really got battened down. Tourist no longer came to Belfast because it was not safe. In all over 3000 people were murdered in a very small area.
At one point, the military was brought to try to create order, and eventually just went door-to-door and sorted it out: This neighborhood is going to be Catholic. This neighborhood is going be Protestant and forced people to move.
We met our taxi driver tour guide, Cecil, in the rain and he had us hop in the back of his black taxi. We spent the next hour and a half with him telling us all kinds of facts and stories about both sides of the conflicts. He was a unique neutral place where he was Protestant, but he was married to a Catholic woman. And he had lived out of the area in London for quite some time before coming back. Some of the tours are known to be highly partisan, really giving only the perspective of the Catholic or only of the Protestant. This particular company decided they wanted to try to the best they could give both sides.
One of the ways that the authorities tried to create a less violent situation, was putting up what was known as peace walls. These were walls of various material that were put up to separate the Catholic and Protestant areas. They are now a place where a lot of murals and artwork are on the walls. But even to this very day, gates between the areas begins shutting down for the night at 6 o’clock or 7 o’clock or 9 o’clock and stay close keeping the areas apart until morning.
Also included was focusing on many of the political prisoners who had committed violent crimes, and then were in terrible situations in jail. Some of them went on a hunger strike and eventually died while in jail. Depending on your perspective, they were either heroes and martyrs, or criminals.
The stories were very sad of happenings like a guy with a bomb going into a fish and chips restaurant, blowing up the bomb and then killing multiple people, including small children. There were also lots of deaths of police officers and military service members.
The art in the murals was very moving and it was so helpful to have somebody help us understand a little bit of who some of all of these people were.
Many famous people have visited here, including the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Bill Clinton. There was a long section of the wall where people were invited to sign in support of What’s up, peace, and both Patti and Dick took our turn to sign our names.
It was a very sobering time as we drove through really normal feeling city streets and then there would be plaque or Memorial Gardens talking about the people who were murdered there.
There was also a big section now focusing on concerns about what’s happening between the Palestinians and Israelis. We heard about people feeling like that there were parallels between what happened in Northern Ireland and what was happening in Gaza. The world continues to be a very troubled place.
After the tour, we had a chance to walk through the beautiful Belfast City Hall, which had amazing exhibits of history of the city. This fit in with what we had learned at the Titanic Museum about how much industry was really focused in this thriving city. There were lots of interesting exhibits. Some serious and some quite playful, including jump rope rhymes kids did, and some of the basics things about specific thing about the accent, word choice and favorite expressions in Belfast. It was a very well done museum and filled with a lot of wonderful things.
It was then time to walk back again through the pouring rain to our Airbnb. After a little bit of a rest, we were picked up by couple of brothers of one of our Servas hosts, Harry and Alistair. They picked us up and we drove about 20 minutes outside of town to the Belfast castle. This castle had long history and was known to have beautiful views of the city, however, it was dumping rain and very cloudy so no views for us or walks through the lovely gardens today.
However, we were able to have a cozy lunch with the four of us talking about work, family, politics, television and movies. It is always fun to get a chance to meet some actual people who live places. They had a lot of interesting perspectives. We’re always amazed at how people in other countries keep track of US politics and they really knew a lot about our presidential campaign and elections. We had a very nice lunch and lingered in conversation, but then it was time to head back to our flat.
The rain just kept coming. We settled in for a while to work on photos and read. But at last hunger brought us out and we roamed looking for food. We tried a couple of restaurants that didn’t work out and finally settled into a nice Greek restaurant where we had really good food. It turns out our server was having her very first shift and she was very confused about many things. But we had good food and even some leftovers that would eat for lunch the next day.
But we walked back in increasingly hard rain, and although it was an aspirational thought to go out to hear some traditional Irish music in a pub, slogging through the wet streets with dumping down rain just wasn’t appealing.
Instead, we had time just to settle in and get caught up on our pictures and our writing. It was a very damp day in Belfast. Fairly miserable weather, but the first day in our whole trip that it rained the entire day, so far that’s a pretty good record. Time to go to bed and get up early because tomorrow we leave for Dublin.
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