We’re done traveling now so you won’t see any more pictures from exotic locales or hear any more about how warm it is in Italy.  This is as disappointing for us as it is for you (probably more so for us).  Classes are finished and this week is set aside for nothing but studying.  We haven’t found this to be the University’s most effective decision since most people have gone home to party and the few that remain prefer belligerence over studiousness.

Yet here we are, in Kilmurry Village, cooking in what can only be described as filth.  It wasn’t so bad last week because of the periodic cleanliness check that all buildings must undergo.  Katherine and I have found it rather silly that the adults must come check on our cleanliness, but given the teenagers we live with it’s been a blessing in disguise.  The kitchen magically becomes clean the night before these checks with no moldy bread lying around, no three-week-old stains on the plates, and no spilled milk on the table/floor/counter.  And then the next day comes.

It usually starts with breakfast.  Someone puts milk and cereal in a bowl, eats a bit, and leaves it there for a few days.  At lunchtime someone else may fry sausage on the stove and leave the pan there until the next day.  Then dinnertime rolls around and chaos breaks loose.  After a night of noodles, sauce, and TV-watching, someone apparently could not muster the strength to a) finish their food or b) throw their old sauce away or c) clean the pot they used.  The result of all this is below.

The brats were rather expensive, but they were cooked by real Germans and were almost as good as the ones I had in Berlin.  Katherine tried a Hawaiian flavored French baguette which turned out to be pretty good.  The star of the party, however, was the DUTCH PANCAKES.

I won’t say how much we spent on these pancakes, but they were almost worth every penny.  Imagine 25 small, circular, slightly thick pancakes on a plate covered in powdered sugar and chocolate sauce.  This is essentially what they were, but they tasted so much better than that.  They were, by far, the best part of Belfast.

It turns out that the bus company’s garage had experienced a bit of a fire a few days ago and not all the buses could be stored in the garage.  Our bus was one of the lucky ones that had been sitting outside all night.  There was snow on the seats.  The windows up front were completely frosted over.  I was excited.

Here are the highlights of the tour:

Pictures 5-6: Albert’s clocktower is leaning four feet from the perpendicular because it was built on the soft, marshy mud of the river.  Belfast, similar to Dublin, has managed to put one of its rivers inside a tube and bury it under the streets of the city.

Picture 10: This was the dry dock where Titanic was built.  It might not look very big, but this only held the lower third of the hull.

Picture 11: Samson and Goliath are the names of these two enormous cranes.  They’re used by the Harland and Wolff shipbuilders and are among the biggest cranes of their kind in the world.

Pictures 12-19: This is the Northern Ireland Parliament building and associated grounds.  It was placed five miles outside the city on a big hill.  Picture us, on the top of an open-top bus, in the freezing cold, speeding down the highway to get to this site.

Picture 23: The courthouse (picture 22) closed in 1997.  The night it closed someone scaled the building and took the scale from the statue on top.  It was sold the next day on eBay for 180 pounds.

Picture 27: The Europa Hotel has the distinction of being the ‘most bombed hotel in Europe.’  According to Wikipedia, it “was damaged 33 times by Provisional IRA bombs between 1972 and 1994.”

Picture 28: After the bus tour we were quite numb and went inside this McDonald’s to warm up.

That’s what Belfast is like at the end of November.

Ireland in general seems to be going through a particularly cold month, actually.  Limerick’s average low in December is 40 degrees Farenheit.  At night it usually gets down to 25 degrees Farenheit and the frost on the ground doesn’t melt until the sun starts going down.  Keep in mind that Belfast is over 100 miles north of Limerick and much closer to the ocean.

I had six layers on Saturday and Sunday and I was still shivering for two days straight.  Our bed and breakfast was also cold (the owner turned the heat off at night).  I can’t imagine what it might have been like up at the Giant’s Causeway.

The pictures below only illustrate how painfully cold it was.  The last picture was taken right when the wind blew my hat off.  Look how red my nose was!

IKEA stores are laid out such that the first floor has you walking through several mock rooms in which everything you see can be bought at the store.  This includes paintings, books, cups, carpet, faucets, etc.  We took note of what looked good and what was ugly.  You then walk down to the ground floor and pick out all the accessories you could ever want.  We didn’t buy anything (again) but I decided that the Swedes have got globalization figured out.

Luckily, the Titanic was built in Belfast and someone has capitalized on this by offering a Titanic boat tour!  Actually, I thought it was a walking tour at first, but we found ourselves on a boat so it became a boat tour.  This boat tour wasn’t much better than the one in Dublin since much of Belfast (especially the shipyard) has been replaced with new buildings.  We did learn a few interesting things about the Titanic’s history, however:

1. The Titanic had two sisters, the Olympic (slightly smaller) and the Brittanic (slightly larger).
2. The Olympic was damaged twice while the Titanic was being built.  When the Olympic came back to Belfast for repairs the Titanic had to be moved out of the dry dock.  Thus, the Titanic was completed behind schedule and it departed later, when it was colder.  Had it left on time there may have been fewer icebergs in the warmer water.
3. Titanic’s Captain Smith was the captain of the Olympic when it had both of its accidents.
4. Just before the Olympic left (after being repaired) the second time, a few crew members were swapped from the Olympic to the Titanic at the last minute.  One of the men who switched from the Titanic to the Olympic had the key to the cabinet in the crow’s nest where the binoculars were.  He forgot to hand it over and nobody saw the iceberg in time.

We also saw the Nomadic, built at the same time as the Titanic, which was one of the two ferries built to take passengers out to the Titanic.  The Nomadic held the first and second class passengers while the Traffic ferried the steerage passengers.  The Nomadic is also the last of White Star’s boats afloat.  It was being used as a restaurant in Paris until the Northern Ireland government bought it and brought it back to Belfast.

We didn’t buy anything from this mall (yet) but we went up to the top of their observation platform for a view of the city.  I don’t know of any other malls with observation decks covered by big glass domes.  The view was pretty good, but most of the notable sights in the city were obstructed by new building being built.

Later on we returned to the mall and ate at Nando’s, a Portuguese chicken restaurant.  The chicken was too spicy for me (and I got the “plain” flavoring) but the corn on the cob was excellent.  If you’re ever in Northern Ireland, keep in mind that you can get great corn on the cob at the Portuguese chicken restaurant.

We also walked around Belfast’s new outdoor mall and saw Santa waving to all the kiddies below.  The streets were packed with shoppers (in Dublin too) and everything seemed ready for Christmas.  The only difference was that I usually see these scenes near big-box stores in suburbia, yet all this was taking place in a European city centre amongst all the lights.

• front doors leading out to the water
• a casino with a red carpet leading right out to the water
• taxi(boat) drivers
• floating bus stops
• ornately decorated buildings
• lots of sunshine

You can see it all for yourself below. This made for a perfect last few hours in Venice.