Béal Feirste

As I mentioned before, laziness caused my leaving of Dublin to be postponed until early afternoon on the Saturday and thus I didn't arrive into Belfast until about 5pm. My CSer Dave met me at the bus station and took me back to his place where I met his housemate Shorty, and my couch. Pretty much from there we got ourselves some dinner from the local chippy and then got onto the drinks. That was one of the latest nights I'd had in a while, out until 7am at a groovy 3-floor club and then a house party. Phew. An eclectic group of friends made for a wonderfully vibrant night and one of their mates' "stories" of his first sexual experiences kept everyone entertained for what felt like hours, somehow.
Well, as we all know, a night late to bed usually results in a morning late to arise. Midday was my time for waking and this meant that, due to the current time of the year, I had only about 4 hours or so left of daylight. I had no specific plans for what I wanted to see and so just wandered about the pretty city centre, with it's own small version of the London Eye (as evidently can be found in a lot of UK cities), until the sun did set. In that time I managed to unknowingly fund a faction of immigrants that have been illegally obtaining and selling Ireland's equivalent of the homeless magazine, The Big Issue. It was a good read, though.
I got to chatting a fair bit with Shorty about the difference in viewpoints between the people of Northern Ireland and the Republic on the occupation by Britain. "Ireland" is divided into 32 counties, 26 in the Republic and 6 in Northern Ireland. I managed to get a fairly good idea from my time in the south that the general consensus is that they want unification - for Britain to retreat and return power of those 6 counties back to the Republic. I also got the feeling that there is still quite a deep seeded feeling of resentment towards the English in particular. On the other side of the border I understand there is a fair amount of the same sentiments, although obviously they're more diluted due to the fact that the majority of residents here are in fact UK citizens. The problems that have long plagued the north have all but subsided - the IRA are virtually unseen in these parts and the religious division between Catholics and Protestants is dwindling due largely to a decline in church attendance - though there are still some residual fears about walking through certain areas of Belfast as a Catholic, for instance.
One other thing that I noticed? The people of Ireland have a real problem with littering. So much so that the governments of both countries have had to spend a huge amount of money on advertising campaigns telling people not to throw their rubbish on the ground. Odd.
That little problem aside, I enjoyed my very short time in the country's capital, and the whole of Ireland for that matter. I plan to return at some point with a car (most likely rented) to explore the counties freely and on my own terms because I didn't really see all that much of Ireland during my 2 months there: Glendalough, Dublin and Galway in the Republic and only Belfast in the north - so much more to see.
In the morning I jumped into a taxi at 6am heading for the ferry port. My ferry back to Britain left at 7:30am on the 22nd of December and this time it was heading north-east, towards Scotland.

Photos:

Dave, Shorty and I - Merry Cut-Mas...?

Some of the Gang

I want that wok!

the city centre, very festive