We took a couple of nights trip to Northern Ireland to show Robert the sights, visit some old favorites, and see some new things. First, we went to the new Titanic museum experience, which was really amazing. I don’t have any photos of that but we do highly recommend it! Then we drove into the city center to our hotel, where this head was mounted on the exterior wall. Peace, that’ll be a theme that I’ll come back to as we go through the rest of the evening!
We decided to go on a Black Cab Tour of Belfast, which is a ride in a regular taxi with a driver, but through the neighborhoods that experienced a lot of violence during what’s called the Troubles between Belfast’s traditionally Protestant / Unionist and Catholic / Republican groups. These tours are really popular and we found it extremely interesting. We first went to the Shankill Road neighborhood, which is Protestant, and where people were building huge structures that would be lit on fire later that week as part of the annual Orange Order celebration. I’m looking for another word to replace celebration… it’s a tradition that has been associated with a lot of violence, fortunately not too bad this year though. Anyway, see the cake like structure in the photo below? It’s made of pallets and probably 10 stories high, all filled on the inside with junk like old furniture. The entire thing is lit on fire as a crazy big bonfire on July 12th. Pretty crazy.
A major feature of both the Shankill and Falls Roads (Catholic) area is the murals. We saw loads of them, and you can see the full collection of photos on my flicker site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cynren/sets/72157645895690397/. Here are just a few from Shankill:
Then we drove out of that area and to see the Peace Wall. The Peace Wall divides the two neighborhoods and has been added onto twice when the existing wall proved to be not high enough to stop people who wanted to throw explosives over it. The wall is now 45′ high. There are gates in the wall that are now all open except for one that still is closed at night.
Then we went into the Falls Road area. The houses in the Falls are really close to the Peace Wall, and so houses that are right up against the wall have a big cage over their backyards so that an explosive or other missile wouldn’t hit the house itself. The Falls area also has a lot of murals.
A lasting impression our driver gave was the importance of peace in the area and how the violence is perpetrated by relatively small groups of people whose power exists in terrifying those around them. The tours of the areas are actually very cool in that they really demystify the conflict, and hopefully in that those who gain from the conflict will lose power and lives will be improved for ordinary people in the area. So after the tour we went back to the hotel, where I also took a photo of the Alexander von Humboldt head that was up on the exterior wall next to “Peace.” We went to dinner in a really lovely place then went back to the hotel and saw Brazil lose big time to Germany. Great day! (Maybe not for Brazil!)
