The North.

 Hello again!

We are back from Northern Ireland (Derry and Belfast) and now stay in Spiddal for the next two and a half weeks with only day trips. It is nice to know we are here for a while, nice to finally grocery shop for meals instead of limiting what we buy so we don't waste food when we leave for 5 days. And this will be a lot of pictures again... too many things are hard to explain without actually seeing them.

We left on Wednesday for Derry, after sitting five and a half hours in class in the morning we got to sit on a bus for five hours in the afternoon. On our way we stopped at Yeats' tomb at Duncliffe. Yeats was buried elsewhere but was moved to Ireland 10 years later. The grave itself was boring, but the church and graveyard was on a hill overlooking a mountain and the view was beautiful.

We got to Derry at night and had dinner provided for us at a pub. Derry is the only fully walled city left in Ireland so we had to wander to find a gate into the city. Anyway, dinner was delicious and dessert was included... Bailey's cheesecake. Yum.

Free Derry is where a lot of "The Troubles" took place from 1968 - 2008 between the Protestants and Catholics, Nationalists and Loyalists. Because of this, there are murals all over commemorating events that took place during this period.

The Free Derry sign. You can see the news crew, this is across the street from the Bloody Sunday memorial. The day we did this walking tour the British Government said they would pay reparations to the Bloody Sunday victims' families.

first civilian victim of The Troubles, the students
still wear these uniforms, were walking the streets
as we learned about this mural

Free Derry got its name by someone writing  "You are now entering Free Derry" on the end of a house during one of the riots during The Troubles. This was modeled after whoever wrote a similar line at Berkeley in CA during the anti-war demonstrations, a lot of how the Irish rebelled is based on protests in the US and South Africa.

The  mural to the right is really cool, up until a year or so ago the butterfly was black and white and the gun was black and whole. The people of Free Derry commissioned an artist to change the mural, the colorful butterfly representing life and hope and the broken gun to say that it will never happen again. Our tour guide was very emphatic about this point, that things have changed. He thanked us as tourists for helping to show the world that there is nothing to fear by going to the North.





There are two main events that took place in Free Derry, the Battle of Bogside and Bloody Sunday.  The Battle of Bogside was the first major event of The Troubles, it was a three day riot during which over 1000 people were injured and led to British Troops being stationed there which most people were okay with as they were viewed as a non-biased group...


Bloody Sunday was when British troops shot and killed 14 Nationalists who were not armed. It wasn't until 2010, 38 years later that the British Government gave a formal apology and admitted that those 14 victims were not armed.


In Free Derry there is a Civil Rights museum which is essentially a museum dedicated to The Troubles, inside they have clothes the victims wore during Bloody Sunday (with bullet holes showing the victims were shot in the back), letters like the one below, rubber bullets which killed at least six people and other artifacts from this time.  Our archaeology prof came with us, she grew up just outside of the army checkpoint and had to walk through it every day to go to school. She saw a 12 year old boy shot in the face with a rubber bullet on the way to school, had to run to the church during school multiple times because the school she attended was on the main riot street (our hostel was one street over) and could tell us all these first-hand stories about The Troubles.

A letter sent to one of the Bloody Sunday victims' families by the head of the UVF, the IRA's counterpart. One of the many interesting things in the Free Derry Civil Rights Museum 

On a lighter note, Thursday was Arthur Guinness day. I drank my first and last Guinness (and by drank I mean like a third of it) at 17:59 on Arthur Guinness's birthday at the year/time of its creation, 1759.

We left Derry on Friday  and stopped at the Bushmills Whiskey distillery and Giant's Causeway on our way to Belfast. The distillery tour was very cool, the end result mostly disgusting but that may just be personal preference.

Giant's Causeway is an area of naturally occurring hexagonal stone columns that was formed 60 millionish years ago. The Irish legend says that Finn McCool was building a stairway to Scotland to fight his Scottish counterpart, however his counterpart was huge so instead Finn McCool dressed up as a baby and when his enemy came to fight him he saw how large Finn's child was and decided he did not want to battle the child's father.

The "peace wall" designed to keep the peace between
the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods.

We did a bus tour in Belfast because the city is much larger than Derry. We saw more evidence of The Troubles, the most significant being a 25 foot tall wall that separates the Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods and still stands today. There were more murals, more fortified police stations. We drove through both the Protestant and Catholic parts of town (we didn't in Derry because the Protestant area is across the river) and it was a very distinct difference. In the protestant area you saw murals about the UVF, their current slogan "engaged in peace, ready for war" and plaques to those killed. The Catholic part was very similar to Derry.

The rest of the pictures are things we saw in Belfast...

The red brick building on the left is where the Titanic was designed, the new modern building is the new Titanic museum.  The titanic was built on the wharf behind these buildings and dry docked there until it sailed in April of 1912

Belfast Castle - on a hill overlooking Belfast. The gardener had a much loved cat. If you can find all 9 images of the cat in the garden it is supposed to bring you luck 

Belfast City Hall - with a statue of Brittania on top and a statue dedicated to Edward Carson, the lawyer who argued for Northern Ireland's right to stay with the UK 

Queen's university in Belfast

So that was my weekend! We got tired of going to pubs so one night in Belfast we went to a movie instead, The Guard. It is about an Irish cop and a drug deal that takes place in Spiddal and Barna (the next town over) so there are scenes in the movie shot in Spiddal. It was kinda weird becuase we would laugh at different parts than the rest of the theater (like the ad before the movie about no cell phone usage) but it was fun!

We had some delicious white chili tonight for dinner, perfect because it is kind of chilly here. Any easy soup recipes (or other delicious and easy recipes) would be much appreciated now that we have time to actually make meals! Just email them if you get the chance.

michelle