Saturday, June 2 – Day 5 (Belfast to Dublin)
We woke up to rain AGAIN today, but Rich and I decided to head out into Belfast for the morning so we could catch an early train to Dublin. Belfast is a fascinating place steep with a modern history – “the Troubles” – that I never knew very much about! Like Ireland itself (split into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland), Belfast is a divided city – quite literally…A “peace wall” splits the city into the Catholic section and the Protestant section. The Catholic Falls Road and Protestant Shankill Road, on either side of this peace wall, have been battlefronts since the 1970s. Even today, for the most part, members of each faith do not cross into each other’s “territory” and do not mingle.
Rich and I took a walk down both Falls Road and Shankill Road and crossed through a gated section of the peace wall seen here…
This is actually only one of the gates at this point in the wall. Rich took this photo while standing in a doorway (like the one behind me) of another gate that was parallel to this one blocking the same thru-way.
On the Catholic Falls Road was this pristine memorial for volunteers and members of Sein Fein and the IRA’s Company D who lost their lives during the conflict...
The city is being rejuvenated, but the history still stands (around almost every corner). It seemed everywhere we walked throughout the city we found impressively large murals expressing political and religious passions. Here are a couple of examples…
After trekking all over town, we took a train from Belfast to Dublin. We were worried about trying to find a place to stay on a Saturday night in Dublin – known for its Temple Bar party district. Fortunately, after striking out on our internet searches, we had success booking a hostel over the phone (from Scotland). So upon arrival, we headed straight for the hostel. We decided to take some time to calendar out the rest of our adventures (I’ll try to provide a list in another post so you can know where we are headed and when). We took a walk to the local grocery store and grabbed one of each of the various Irish beers they had in stock (a sort of taste test, if you will). We spread out in the lobby area of the hostel and got down to business with our guidebooks (and our beers).
After a short time, we noticed that we would be sharing the hostel with several groups in town for their “hen party” or “stag party.” What a riot! Here Rich pretends to take a picture of me with my Harp, but he really was tickled by the games being played by the hen party behind me – all decked out for their night on the town…
After we had a rough draft of our calendar complete (and all the beers were gone too), we decided to venture over to Temple Bar to find a bite to eat. We took a seat by the window, and before calling it a night, we must have counted no less than twenty hen and stag parties.
We woke up to rain AGAIN today, but Rich and I decided to head out into Belfast for the morning so we could catch an early train to Dublin. Belfast is a fascinating place steep with a modern history – “the Troubles” – that I never knew very much about! Like Ireland itself (split into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland), Belfast is a divided city – quite literally…A “peace wall” splits the city into the Catholic section and the Protestant section. The Catholic Falls Road and Protestant Shankill Road, on either side of this peace wall, have been battlefronts since the 1970s. Even today, for the most part, members of each faith do not cross into each other’s “territory” and do not mingle.
Rich and I took a walk down both Falls Road and Shankill Road and crossed through a gated section of the peace wall seen here…
This is actually only one of the gates at this point in the wall. Rich took this photo while standing in a doorway (like the one behind me) of another gate that was parallel to this one blocking the same thru-way.On the Catholic Falls Road was this pristine memorial for volunteers and members of Sein Fein and the IRA’s Company D who lost their lives during the conflict...
The city is being rejuvenated, but the history still stands (around almost every corner). It seemed everywhere we walked throughout the city we found impressively large murals expressing political and religious passions. Here are a couple of examples…
After trekking all over town, we took a train from Belfast to Dublin. We were worried about trying to find a place to stay on a Saturday night in Dublin – known for its Temple Bar party district. Fortunately, after striking out on our internet searches, we had success booking a hostel over the phone (from Scotland). So upon arrival, we headed straight for the hostel. We decided to take some time to calendar out the rest of our adventures (I’ll try to provide a list in another post so you can know where we are headed and when). We took a walk to the local grocery store and grabbed one of each of the various Irish beers they had in stock (a sort of taste test, if you will). We spread out in the lobby area of the hostel and got down to business with our guidebooks (and our beers).
After a short time, we noticed that we would be sharing the hostel with several groups in town for their “hen party” or “stag party.” What a riot! Here Rich pretends to take a picture of me with my Harp, but he really was tickled by the games being played by the hen party behind me – all decked out for their night on the town…
After we had a rough draft of our calendar complete (and all the beers were gone too), we decided to venture over to Temple Bar to find a bite to eat. We took a seat by the window, and before calling it a night, we must have counted no less than twenty hen and stag parties.
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