Anyway, Belfast is a great city. We've been doing more walking here, than I have in most of my life for the period of about a week I'd say. The dorms that we're staying in (Elms Village, I'll try to put in a picture below) are an 18 minute walk from the Student Union building where we go for breakfast on the weekdays, and were about 20 minutes from where we had class for the first two days, and about 15 from where we had class on Friday. We've also walked downtown (probably 30 minutes or so) a few times, so it's been a lot of exercise. That can never be a bad thing though. The first two days of class were a history of Northern Ireland. We were lectured to by a really cool professor here named Dominic, who basically went over the entire history of Northern Ireland, including the Troubles, and everything up to the present day. We talked mainly about the religious tension between the Catholics and the Protestants (which keeping straight who's who can be confusing). After we learned about the basics of the strife and conflict (I'm sure it can all be found on Wikipedia) we took a bus tour of the city's "peace walls" and murals. It was fascinating to see entirely Protestant neighborhoods and Catholic neighborhoods divided by these massive 30' walls. And sometimes those weren't/aren't high enough to keep things being thrown from one side to the other. A short story to demonstrate this point: at one point they were building a bridge over the highway, from a main Catholic part to a mainly Protestant part and they accidentally made the bridge too high, to the point where it was a spot of elevation that made it easier to throw bottles and whatnot over the "peace wall," which meant they had to move it. It's really incredible. While the major conflict hasn't been going on for about 10 years, it's still incredibly obvious the effects that it's had on the area. Even one of our taxi drivers, when we asked him if he watched Gaelic football, responded, "No, that's a Roman Catholic sport." Well I had no idea.
Our class on Friday was more getting into what we'll be talking about for the rest of the weeks we're here. We had a city planner (shout out, Dad) talk to us about urban planning in Belfast. An interesting thing about it is that here in Europe it's much more social/welfare focused, while the US is more legal/zoning focused. I won't bore (Jumbo) you with the details, but one cool thing we did learn was that all the land in the UK is property of the crown, so no one actually owns any land. They just have a lease for 999 years. Crazy!
After that on Friday morning, in the afternoon we went to the "cave hills" and climbed them. We only saw one cave, but the view was amazing from the top, and really gave you a sense of accomplishment (as well as being able to see Scotland). I've put pictures of that below as well.
Today we went for an all-day bus tour of the Northern Coast where we saw a few castles, some ridiculously amazing views, and Giant's Causeway (which some call the eighth wonder of the world--I'm not one of them). It was really cool, but the bus ride was pretty long, and by the time we got back everyone was pretty bushed.
I'll try to write more about that tomorrow, so until then, here are some pictures! They should be pretty self explanatory, but if they need explanation, just let me know in the comments.
Talk to you all in a wee bit,
Jon
No comments:
Post a Comment