MacKat in Ireland

We didn’t quite get a feel for the “real” Belfast on Saturday so we took the standard tourist bus trip on Sunday.  I was under the impression that we would ride on the lower floor, inside the bus.  Once we got on, the rules were changed on me and we ended up on the second floor of the open-top bus.  Katherine’s reasoning was “We’re only in Belfast once.”  I couldn’t really argue with that, unfortunately.

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.

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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!