I can tell you anything I want and it will be true as long as I say "according to legend" after it.

Day 3 in Belfast and the fun has really only just begun. We started our day off with a black taxi tour of the city at 9:30 in the morning. We ended up being in the earliest group to go but that actually worked out better because we then had the rest of the day to do whatever we wanted. I have to say our group ended up with the best taxi driver. His name was Pat and he informed us all that despite how attractive he may be he doesn’t give out his number and won’t be collecting any of our since he went the other way. The fact that he could introduce himself and give us a good laugh in the first sentence let us know that we were in for a good time. We started off on the protestant side of Belfast (the west) and we drove over to where there were some of the wall murals. There are murals everywhere on both sides of Belfast that are a huge clue as to what side you’re on and it is also how they remember the people who have lost their lives fighting for their cause. A lot of the murals are pieces of the story and of what has happened. The mural that Pat really wanted us to see is of a gunman who was painted so that no matter where you are standing in relation to the mural it looks like he is pointing his gun at you. It is a symbol of how no matter where any of them were, or the Catholics were, that it wasn’t safe and someone was always watching. It’s true there were always men out with guns killing people and there were a lot of massacres. One cool thing though that we did learn was that the way a man on his horse is painted means something. If the horse’s two front hooves are in the air it means that both he and his rider survived the battle. If one hoof is on the ground it means the rider died, if they are both down then both the horse and his rider did not survive. Now every time I see a painting with a horse in it that’s all I can think of. Once we had seen the murals on the buildings we drove over to the peace wall that separates the east and west sides of Belfast. It was built in 1969 (I believe) and it was meant to be a way for the police and army to monitor who went back and forth between the two sides. The wall is sort of like neutral territory. People have come from all around the world to write on the wall and to send messages of peace to the warring sides. A lot of very famous people such as Gandhi and Bill Clinton (they are the only two I can currently remember) signed the wall and their messages were actually engraved as part of the art work that was recently added to the wall. You can write whatever you’d like on the wall. People write ridiculous things on the wall. There was someone who wrote that their state was the best and multiple comments off of it saying that other states were better. When they say you can write anything you can literally write anything. The taxi drivers all pulled out markers and allowed us to sign our names on the wall before we left. It’s cool to think that despite how long the wall is and how many people sign it, my name is somewhere on there too.

Once everyone had finished signing the wall we crossed through the gates of the wall and were on the Catholic side of Belfast. They took us to a memorial for the people who were killed by British troops. It was also the memorial for a group of martyrs. While we were there the taxi driver who was talking to us pulled out three bullets that were used by the British troops and were known to be aimed straight at the heads of little children and fired. They were not meant to be shot at a close range. The smaller of the two bullets were longer than the palm of my hand and the biggest one looked like a little rocket. It was longer than my hand and it pulled apart into two different parts. When you’re in the middle of a major war I know that the mentality is very different but it’s horrific to think that these men were just walking around pointing guns at the head of little kids and other people just because they were on opposing sides. They were killed just for being Catholic; a lot of the people who were killed were civilians. War does some crazy things to people and I’ll never understand that, but it really sunk in that there were kids dying because of the family that they grew up in. I’ll move on from that though. We made another stop at the mural of this one guy who was really crucial to the Catholics but with all of the traffic that was around us I have no clue what was being said to us. I know he’s important, hence the mural of him, but I’m not entirely sure why. I do remember something about him dying during a hunger strike though. He was in prison when Margaret Thatcher came into office and she said that they had too much freedom in prison and they weren’t suffering enough. She took away a lot of their freedoms and they went on a hunger strike and he was one of the important guys who died during that time. So I do remember something about it. His name is Bobby Sands I just looked at my pictures. Honestly if you look through all of my pictures you will probably learn a lot more about any of this than I’m telling you. Our last stop on the tour was another peace wall (there were a lot built but the main one was the one we signed) and there were a lot of murals that actually had nothing to do with the issues in Ireland. A lot of them had to do with other political issues between other countries or were ads for different things in Ireland. One was about the black taxis. There was even one about the US and Cuba. Apparently they change that one with every president because the bottom of it now reads “The world opposes US blockade of Cuba. Time for change Mr. Obama.” It used to read something about Bush apparently. All the guy told us is that it used to say something like “You son of a Bush” which got a nice reaction of laughter out of us all. To end the tour Pat took pictures of our group in front of our taxi with some of the murals in the background. We had such a great time with Pat that we asked him to get into one of our pictures. He knew whose camera was whose because we had handed them to him so he went around and would get really close to the person who the camera belonged to. That would explain why there’s a random guy cuddling up to me in one of the pictures. It’s just Pat our taxi driver.

Once we got back to the hotel Pat shook all of our hands and then asked us what we had planned for the day. Since we weren’t really sure he told us how to get the Ulster museum which was only about 10 minutes away, and wished us a good day. We figured why not go to the museum and see what’s there. We walked towards it and on our way we had to pass The Europa which Pat had told us was the most bombed hotel in all of Europe and that it had been bombed 5 times. Why? He never told us. Why they would rebuild the hotel every time, well we aren’t really sure about that either. We happen to be talking about it as we walked past another tour guide from a different tour company and he told us we were wrong. That it had actually had 77 bomb attempts on it and was successfully bombed 33 times. By successful he means that at least the doors were blown off the place. He then told us that the black taxi tour guides were a little misguided and wrong about some things. So now we don’t know how many times the hotel has been bombed but it’s either 5, 33, or 77 times. We even though of going inside and asking at the front desk if they knew and decided at the last minute against it, so we settled with taking a picture of the front door and we moved on. On our way to the museum we came across The Queen’s University of Belfast. It looked like a castle. They really do take pride in the appearances of their universities. With UCC you will only ever see pictures of the quad and the building that surrounds it because it looks like a part of a castle and it is the oldest building on the campus. They like the way that it looks compared to the rest of the more modern buildings on campus. The Queen’s University though was gorgeous and we decided to go look around it a bit. They have a statue of the queen right in the courtyard. When you walk into the foyer of the main building there is a statue of a very pensive Galileo. We didn’t really wander too far into the university but it is very historical and they keep it that way.

The museum wasn’t too far from the university and actually past the museum there is a botanical garden and we decided to go see what was there before we went into the actual museum. Once again I’m just going to say go look at the pictures. There were so many different plants and all I can tell you is that from my point of view I saw a lot of trees, cacti, shrubs, really pretty flowers, and plants. I’m really not sure what a lot of them are and actually I usually learn what some of them are from Ash who is a plant major (aka horticulture) at UConn. After I took pictures of everything in there I wandered around the museum for over an hour taking pictures of everything in there. Maybe even a few that I was technically supposed to take but I didn’t know that and the lady never made me delete the ones I had before she asked me to not takes pictures. So they’re there. I took pictures of everything in the museum so if you flip through the pictures you will see everything that I saw, minus about 99% of the paintings. I have a few pictures of the paintings that were taken before I was told not to. Actually I filled my memory card on one camera not too long after I got to the last floor of the museum so I have a video of the rest of it. I actually still need to figure out how to put videos up since I also have the ones from the rugby match last month. By the time that we finished in the museum it was lunch time so we went to a nearby pub where we unknowingly walked into the middle of a gathering to watch the soccer game that was on that day. It was very calm and quiet when we walked in and we could see the game on the tv. Then one of the teams scored and the entire pub roared with excitement. They showed the replay of the shot like 3 times and every time the guys in the pub went crazy. I know that soccer is huge here in Europe, but that was certainly an awakening experience.

Since we still had quite a bit of daylight left we decided to go see if we could walk around the courtyard of the city hall and actually see everything that is there. Of course we end up at the rear entrance to the city hall and the guard tells us that it’s closed for the day. We’re thinking that we can’t go walk around, but he tells us that there is a café we can go into and look around all of the historical galleries in there. So we went in and of course we’re going to be curious and see how far in we can wander. So we followed the signs to the bathrooms which led us out to the main entrance of the city hall and we were able to look around a bit there. We at least walked into the bathrooms since there was a guard sitting at the desk kind of giving us that look of “you shouldn’t be here.” So what do we do? We wander even further into the building and actually end up walking in on a photo shoot for a wedding. Oops… We were very quick to leave though and we actually found an exit that went out to the courtyard of the city hall and there were people everywhere. Then we realized that the guard at the back was telling us that the inside of the building was closed for tours and walking around. We got to walk around and see all of the different statues that were out there. Once we had our fill of taking pictures of the statues we went back to The Little Cupcake Café that we had passed on our way back from the museum. It looked really cute and they had cupcakes for less than 2 pounds so we decided to get them. I got a chocolate Turkish delight cupcake which was absolutely delightful. I actually didn’t eat mine until the next day. I had also gotten a chocolate hazelnut milkshake and I drank that at the time.

We went back to the hotel because a few of the girls wanted to go watch the rugby match that was playing that night. While they did that I uploaded and went through all of my pictures which took a really, really long time. Once the match was over we all met down in the lobby and found our way out to Weatherspoons, a local pub and had dinner. Colleen and I split a warm chocolate fudge cake for dessert and it was so good. I definitely got my chocolate fix for a while that day. We went for a walk afterwards and found the lady with the thanksgiving ring. I’m actually really not sure what that statue is all about but I’ve seen pictures of it everywhere and it was really cool to see it up close. I more in awe of the bridge that is was over and just the way the water looked with the lights reflecting on to it. It was just so peaceful and a nice end to the night. The rest of the girls wanted to go out and get drinks at The Crown but I wasn’t really up for it so I went back to the hotel and actually climbed into bed and was out for the night.

Sunday wasn’t really anything special. It was just our trip back home. We did drive through Dublin though and we got to see a lot of sites while we were on the bus. I’m actually really glad that we’ll be going back to Dublin and getting to spend a few days there. Granted we are going for St. Patrick’s Day so it’ll be a little bit crazier than usual as people get ready for the parade and to celebrate. Outside of the parade St. Patrick’s Day is really like thanksgiving for them. They gather together and feast and it’s this grand celebration. Apparently because of something that happened with our program they planned a whole trip the day before, of, and after for us to be in Dublin. It’ll be really exciting. That’s everything for our weekend in Belfast. My next big trip is off to London for 5 days the first weekend of March. So far we haven’t really planned out everything that we’ll be doing there but that Saturday we’re going to a free showing of Macbeth at The Globe which I’m really excited for. We’ve also planned out a Harry Potter walk of the city to go see some of the sites that were used in the films.  Of course we’ll see the Parliament building and Big Ben and a lot of the other main sites to see in London. It’ll be fun.

With Love Always