Northern Ireland

Well, I had this really long amazing post about my weekend trip to Northern Ireland with the FIE group, and then my internet died...sooooo here's a slightly briefer version and without the pictures because they take a long time to load.

We left on Thursday early in the morning and took a pleasantly short bus ride (only 3 hours) to The Giant's Causeway, which is this really neat natural rock formations on the coast. The group explored the causeway for about 1.5 hours, since it was cold and REALLY windy (like bowed almost horizontal as you walk kind of windy). But it was really beautiful. I would love to go back there in the spring when it's sunny and everything's in bloom. They also have a swinging bridge there but it was closed for the season :(

Next we ventured on to Carrickfergus Castle, which was built around the time of King John. It was interesting, but it would have been better if it wasn't raining and windy. But I did get to see some cool period weapons and armor.

We made our way to Derry and found ourselves at a lovely hotel. Hotels are a total luxury for me now. The showers are so much better than the one in my apartment and there is continuous heat! You don't realize what you take for granted at home until you live in another country.

Derry was very interesting to see, but very emotionally straining because it was the site of a lot of the conflict between nationalists and unionists and also the site of Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was the day that British troops murdered peace marchers who were running for shelter. I believe 12 or 14 were killed that day. It was really intense because we got to meet the brother of one of the boys killed that day. Michael Kelly was murdered when he was only 17 and his brother, John Kelly, talked to us and showed us around the Bloody Sunday museum in town. It was very depressing, but very enlightening at the same time because of all we here about the conflict, it's a totally different experience to meet and talk to someone who was actually there.

After Derry we made our way to Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland and also where the Titanic was built. Belfast was even more obviously divided than Derry and there were a bunch of murals all around the city. We took a 3 hour walking tour led by one of my lecturers here at DBS, Noel, who is from Belfast. It was quite enlightening, but after about 2 hours of looking at murals, we were all getting hungry and a bit irritable.

Finally, as we were leaving, we stopped by and saw the yard where the Titanic was built. That was really cool and the ship was HUGE!!!!!

I really enjoyed my trip to N. Ireland, and hopefully tomorrow will be fun too because I'm flying to Scotland. I was supposed to leave last night, but our flight was canceled because of snow (not even that much, like maybe an inch). We were all really frustrated last night, but I've calmed down a bit today. I think a good night's sleep helped. Anywho's, we're flying out bright and early tomorrow morning, think 7:45am, and then rushing our way through Scotland since we've had to condense our trip into about 2 days versus the 3.5 we were going to do it in. Maybe we'll be able to get back to Scotland at some point so we can see stuff we won't be able to see this weekend. Well, toodles for now. I'm going to the Guinness brewery in about 30 minutes with some girls to check that out and have that pint of Guinness Dad keeps bugging me about :P