Travels to the City

We were off to capture cover footage of the city of Belfast today. We decided to save ourselves the headache of driving in the city and trying to find and pay for parking by taking the Belfast Express bus from a park and ride near Hillsborough.

Once in town, we were on the red bus of Belfast City Tours and off around town. The tour guide was very informative and had some interesting story about the different parts of Belfast we passed through.

One of the first spots we went by was the Odyssey Complex. A huge indoor sports arena, the Complex was created when the city fathers decided to bring in a non-secular sport. The sport? Ice hockey. The tour guide said there were only two ice hockey rinks in the country. I guess they're hoping it will catch on. To get folks excited, the Boston Bruins of the NHL were here over the weekend playing a pre-season game vs. one of the top teams from the Czech Republic. The tour guide told us that two proposed nicknames for the team were the Belfast Bombers and Belfast Bullets. Both were thought to be inappropriate. So they went with the Belfast Giants instead.

We moved along to the Titanic Quarter. The Titanic was designed and built in the shipyards here in Belfast. There's a huge influx of money in this area to build it up in anticipation of the centennial of the Titanic disaster in 2012. The tour guide said the Titanic disaster can't be blamed on Belfast. "It was fine when it left Belfast," he said. "The hired an English captain and a Scottish navigator who would hit a Canadian iceberg. So you can't blame us," he added. Later we got to see the Titanic but it was spelled Thai Tanic, a thai restaurant downtown. Very clever.

Then it was off to the Stormont Estate (picture above) where the Northern Irish Assembly meets. Down the hill from the house of government was a small peace park. It had a small statue of two people hugging each other and showing how the city's factions can come together. The tour guide, apparently on loan from a comedy club, said "That's was the Assembly does at the end of each day--group hug."

There were also drive-bys and stories about markets, cathedrals, hospitals, courthouses and jails before we moved into the most dramatic part of the tour. The center of "The Troubles" in Nothern Ireland can be linked to two streets--Shankill Road that's home to the Protestant unionists and The Falls Road that's home to the Catholic republicans. Both areas have very colorful murals painted on the sides of buildings (picture of the Shankill to the left).

They two neighborhoods are almost directly next to each other--not miles but only yards apart. Since the Good Friday Peace Accord of 1998 (less than a year after the Irish young people left Missoula), the bombings, shootings and killings have nearly stopped. John and I stood in a square that the tour guide said no one could walk through without being shot at only 15 years ago. Now there are mothers walking with their babies in strollers and elderly folks walking by. Very intense stuff.

When we went through these areas on the bus tour, it had begun to rain. So I guess it was all right when we noticed that the bus really didn't stop too long at the Hop-On/Hop-Off stops. Then I realized we needed to push the buzzer to let the driver and tour guide know that we wanted off. So we continued all the way through the end of the tour, got on another bus and got off at a few spots along the way to capture our video.

Then instead of waiting for the next tour bus, we walked back to the City Centre and decided to end our day with a pint of beer at the legendary Crown Liquor Saloon (picture left). The saloon has a great looking back bar, dark church stalls like in you'd see in European churches and serves the best whiskeys around. I went with a pint of Guinness while John tried the Belfast Ale. Good end to the day.

A bus ride back to our car and dinner at a Lisburn italian restaurant called Uno and back to bed. We have a long day planned for tomorrow as we head north and west to the Republic of Ireland and the town of Letterkenny to meet up with the first of our former Missoula trainees, Sean Barr. More on Sean and his art tomorrow.