A trip through history

I'm sorry I haven't updated for so long... I wanted to write a really good entry about my trip to Belfast, so I needed some help to do it, but I think it will be better if I simply write what I can remember.

BELFAST

If I'm not mistaken, it was the 1st of April when we took the bus to Belfast at 9 in the morning. We were planning to go there quite early, see the city and come back on the same day. We saw lots of beautiful landscapes from the bus windows and we arrived there around lunch time. The first thing we did was looking for the Welcome Centre (we nearly went to the opposite corner of the city) to change money and know what to do. We had been told lots of times that the best thing to do in Belfast was the Taxi Tour, so we booked one. We had a quick lunch in Subway and when we finished there was an old taxi waiting for us.

This man, who was really nice, showed us around and told us the history of the city and the conflict in Northern Ireland. I would like to write it with more details, but unfortunately my memory is not very good for historical facts and the likes... First of all, even though many people think so, the conflict is not religious, but political. Most of the Catholics consider themselves to be Irish, while most of the Protestants consider themselves to be British. In fact, everything started when lots of English, Welsh and Scottish farmers were encouraged to live in Ireland. The English were afraid that some of their enemies (such as Spain or France) used the island against them because of its strategic location. Another thing we learnt is that the Irish Community in Boston played also a great role in the conflict, since they sent money and weapons to the IRA in order to help them with their cause. These are some of the things we saw in the taxi tour:

This is a monument dedicated to the Clonard Martyrs, all those Catholics from Belfast who died defending the cause. On the wall you can see a list with all their names.

In the protestant quarter there were many paintings on the walls referring to certain chapters of the conflict history, but this was probably the most shocking one. The guy with the riffle produces an optical illusion that makes you think that he's pointing at you all the time.

The real aim of this pic was to show the taxi (it looked lovely), but it will also help me to show someting else. Can you see the high wall on the left? This wall signs the border between both the Catholic and the Protestant quarters. I found this really shocking. Actually, the taxi driver explained to us that we could be sure that anyone we saw on one side of the wall was Protestant and anyone we saw on the other side was Catholic.
After that, we walked a bit in the centre and went for the hard stuff before taking the bus back to Dublin ;)

My general impressions of the city... Well, it's not a really big city, it might be kind of boring to live there. Anyways, I found that trip really interesting, especially the Taxi Tour. But something I noticed is that you really feel as if you were in a different country, there's somthing British in the air...

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