Belfast
It has a couple indoor exhibits, one including some rare lacy ferns.
This is Queens University, a pretty grand affair.
I got off the Dublin Express, the bus from Dublin, crossed the street and was immediately welcomed by these two lovely lassies from Edinburgh. They were traveling down the sidewalk with wine glasses and an open bottle and asked me right off, “How do you like Belfast?” Well, so far, so good. We had an extended delightful conversation, then parted ways. As it turned out, we’d both started out in the wrong direction and turned back and again crossed paths, having yet another delightful conversation. We pinky-finger promised to meet up in Bangkok I think in January.
Earlier at breakfast in my hostel in Dublin, I had the pleasure of dining with three backpackers from different places and we kept up a lively and engaging conversation until I had to rush out and pack up before I exceeded my welcome (11 am checkout). When I said I was going next to Belfast, one of my companions recommended a hostel that she loved and felt was tailor-made for me. Turns out that is where my first night was booked. Oddly, for me it was a bust. The hype was that it was for women who preferred a quiet, lovely, sane stay. The ad explained that it definitely was not for guests who enjoyed a good pub crawl. I guess I’m somewhere between the two demographics. I’m not much of one for Jell-O shots until I puke, but as much as I admire Emily Dickinson and have in fact been a librarian, having managed the library of Buena Vista, Virginia, I found the vibe awful and suffocating. The storage lockers were barely large enough for a mixing bowl. The two bathrooms, yes only two for heaven knows how many women, were each a touch smaller than an airplane toilet. And that included the shower. The receptionist offered sweetly that there was tea and fruit in the kitchen and I could help myself to and a breakfast in the morning. Maybe there was a lovely collection of tea somewhere hidden as I found only a generic black tea. The fruit was just a few old small apples. No coffee for breakfast, unless you drink instant, which is treason in my book. Not coffee at all. There was a small counter area with lovely looking jam and bread along with a little sign that said DO NOT TOUCH unless you require a gluten-free diet. I found suddenly in the morning that I did. The young woman in my room was already settled in for bed very early in the evening, reading not surprisingly a book titled, An Ethical Guide to Murder. I went out to explore the pubs of Belfast just the same.
It’s a dirty old town. It’s a dirty old town. This is a ditty made famous by The Pogues and sung as an Irish tune in the pubs, though the truth is that it’s about a town in England. Belfast is a bit of a dirty old town. This may sound like an exaggeration, but pretty much everybody is drunk and you have to watch yourself a bit as they weave across the sidewalk and are sometimes carrying glass, either bottles or glasses of ale from the last pub that they haven’t yet finished. The weaving can be pretty defined, going from bouncing up against a brick wall to stumbling over the curb into the street. Naturally, there is broken glass and rubbish all about. Not at all like Dublin, but Belfast is in Northern Ireland and part of the UK. It is also an especially noisy town. While trying to find the Duke of York pub just inside an alley of lit up upside umbrellas hanging from stretched lines between buildings, I veered off course to Custom Quay I think, closer to the Titanic Quarters. A band of popular local musicians, Stiff Little Fingers was playing and their music reverberated against the buildings so that it was louder than within the compound just walking around it. Loud enough to warrant earplugs to deafen it a bit. That reminds me, when I was in Dublin, a band that had got back together after ten years, Oasis was playing for two nights and it was the same things: folks everywhere wearing their t-shirts and the bands playing their songs, in that case Wonder Wall, a great song that the pub acoustic players struggled to master. The volume of sound in the Duke of York pub soon exceeded even the Stiff Little Fingers.
The Duke of York bar had some artistic touches and was very crowded, happy and loud, packed with people singing at the top of their voices. Though billed as having trad (traditional) music, I found once again just an acoustic guitar player who played a couple Irish classics like Whiskey in a Jar and The Girl from Galway and a lot of pop songs, primarily from the 1970s. A lot of them I’d never heard, but everyone else knew every word. And he played the same three it seems everyone plays there: Country Road, which especially amused me as I had lived near the border of West Virginia the past twenty-five years, American Pie and kill me if I have to hear it again, Piano Man.
If you go to Robinson’s pub in Belfast and Marty is sitting at the end of the bar nearest the wall, the second bar in, please tell him I said Slawn-cha.
The second night I stayed at the Vagabonds hostel. It was good. Well-run, comfortable, accommodating, happy, clean, good hot shower. I had booked an eight bed mixed room, but Bob placed me in a 12-room (more spacious and only 6 of us) on the first floor which I was grateful for because the staircases in these old buildings are long and steep and I was hot with a heavy backpack when I arrived.
The next morning I went to the Titanic Museum. I had not planned to. I mean, I’d seen the movie, so what else could I learn, right? But I am glad that I went as it helped to explain the feeling rising from the streets in Belfast. So many people were employed in the shipbuilding and related industries there. The usual horror stories of child labor and deadly accidents commonplace, people being crushed by machinery and slipping off the docks, the whole nine yards that make you wonder if you really should be grateful for the philanthropic contributions of the industrialists (Andrew Carnegie and his generous contributions to public libraries in the United States springs to mind - I’m pretty sure I even saw a monument to him in Canada for this) or just be angry at their lust for money and power that made so many lives ridiculously miserable. At any rate, the museum offered a lot of interesting information and immersive experiences. When I left to tour a nearby ship that was the last of the line by the manufacturer of the Titanic, before catching my Glider bus back to town from whence I would walk to the train station and gulped in the cool grey morning air, I felt a bit of vertigo and immeasurable sadness. Really? They didn’t spy the iceberg because they didn’t have a pair of binoculars? And this was because the young man who had the store room key in where they were kept was quickly scooted off the ship and assigned to another left with the key in his pocket? How shitty would you feel if that was you? Somewhere around 1100 died and the 700 survivors likely carried the trauma for the rest of heir lives. But then again, with that many people onboard, especially as a lot of them were from the lower classes in Belfast, surely someone could have been solicited to pick a lock. A snapshot: The potato famine in Ireland was from 1845-52. Between 1851 and 1901 Belfast’s population increased from 87,062 to 349,180. People wanted out and did emigrate, so some locals were onboard for that, but too, a number of people from Belfast onboard were employees. The Titanic sailed and sunk in 1912.
If you are leaving Belfast by train, it makes sense to walk to the nearest station - there is one downtown near the Europa Center, a mall and renowned for being the most bombed building in Belfast. A lot of folks wear political strife on their sleeves here - and buy a Rambler ticket for the day. You can catch the purple Glider bus to and fro the museum, the train from Lanyon Place station to Coleraine and in my case, the Ulster bus to Whitepark Bay Hostel all for 20 pounds. From town you will walk past St. George’s Market, which is only open on the weekend until Sunday at 3 pm and come upon a small grocer called Ever Fresh, I think. Go in there and get a super fresh sandwich. Inexpensive, loaded and healthy.
