Narn Iron

True to my word, I've found a new most beautiful place in Ireland. But maybe I can count it separately because actually Northern Ireland is not Ireland. Two things about that - Belfast and the north coast are absolutely gorgeous (they use that word for food here, which took some getting used to - I ordered lox last night and the waitress insisted it was gorgeous), but it is definitely a little weird to see British flags and Irish ones competing for air space. Although The Troubles ended officially in the 90s, there is still a lot of division as far as Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods (the Protestants tend to be British and the Catholic Irish) and high brick walls between them adorned with enough barbed wire to satisfy a maximum-security prison.

We took a jaunt over to Derry on Friday morning (my friend from Donegal had actually taken me here the week before to see the murals representing many of the problems and events of The Troubles in Northern Ireland) - it is known officially as Londonderry, but referred to mostly as Derry, and nicknamed The Walled City. As its name indicates, a mile-long brick wall runs around a small part of the town that once was "Londonderry" before it merged with the old town of Derry across the river. The name still evokes a bit of controversy though - we came across several signs for "Londonderry" on which the "London" part had been graffitied out. The lady giving us a tour of the town has grown up in the worst of the Troubles and told us that walking home after school, everyone would breathe from vinegar soaked hankerchiefs to stay safe from the fumes and usually had to duck and cover from the bullets flying overhead. Not surprisingly, she said that looking back, she couldn't imagine her own children going through it, but that it was a normal way of life for them.

[Statue in Derry of people reaching across the wall and offering peace]

A couple cab drivers and some friends from the north told me that it's about 50-50 up there now, as far as people who call themselves Irish and people who consider themselves British. And the subject is a touchy one anywhere in Ireland, nearly everyone has a strong opinion about the nationality of the Northern Irish. But you can definitely tell, as you walk from street to street and pick out the flags, which parts house which people. It feels a little like the KU-KState rivalries in Kansas, except that this rivalry has been the cause of unrest in Northern Ireland for decades and only recently settled down.

Other than the evidence of very recent and occasionally ongoing conflict, however, the north was incredible and undoubtedly among the most scenic of places I've been here. And everything is fairly scenic, so that's high praise. We walked around the remains of Dunluce Castle and lunched in the seaside town of Portrush (the holiday destination of choice for many we were told) before chilling precariously on the Giant's Causeway. Which is a massive pile of rocks all roughly the size of a stop sign, but with one extra side. Supposedly, a bridge once stretched from Ireland to Scotland, but a giant tried to cross it one day and it collapsed into thousands of tiny pieces now piled on the north coast. That, or the mud cracks in a big rock eventually eroded. The details are a little fuzzy.


And then Belfast held fast to the wonder of Northern Ireland. On top of the general friendliness everywhere (we met a couple of very cheery bouncers who pointed us toward new pubs every time we walked by - oh and a saleswoman in a perfumerie had recently been to Kansas to visit relatives, that was a first), the town was a perfect mix of small town and big city and was, of course, lovely to look at. Queen's University was a little hard to see (the school I almost studied at this semester) in all its much-prettier-than-UCD-glory, but I met a kid in the science department who reported that it was "alright." So that was my possibly meaningless bit of retribution for picking a school with ugly modern buildings. But I could never sacrifice lovely (and recently festive!) Dublin anyhow (lights went up all down Grafton and O'Connell Street and the Stephen's Green shopping centre is about ten different colors now). And Belfast certainly has lingering violence and tensions, but from a visitor's point of view, it was delightful.

[Belfast city centre - note, the ferris wheel is right next to the court house. Don't know how they get anything done]

Oh, and the Titanic was built there, which was an interesting bit of news to me. At one point they had the biggest shipbuilding industry in the world, but I have a feeling the iceberg fiasco put a bit of a damper on that. Apparently, I didn't know this, the Titanic is one of three identical ships all made in Belfast and which came to be known as The Forgotten (never used for transatlantic voyage), the Beloved (transatlantic voyager) and the Damned (The Titanic).

Also, the accent is wildly different up there and from what I've been told, much more similar to Scottish English. According to my friend from Donegal, it was voted the sexiest accent in Ireland last year. And if the title of this post sounds like gibberish to you, that's the Northern Irish way of saying "Northern Ireland."