A Bit About Belfast

Belfast is famous for the Troubles and the Titanic. However, as the tour bus drivers say... in the case of the Titanic, the captain was English, the navigator was Scottish, and the iceberg was Canadian - the ship was just grand when she sailed out of Belfast!

Population:

267,500

Learned in information sessions, group Armagh:

Made capital of NI in 1920.

The Troubles lasted thirty years, to be resolved (officially) by the Good Friday Agreements in 1998.

The legal drinking age is 18 except when it’s 21.

The police force is abbreviated PSNI, and they’re really quite nice, despite appearances.

Never buy anything from a suspicious man in a pub.

Learned on bus tour:

          The Europa Hotel was the only four-star hotel open during the Troubles, and thus all the important people stayed there – and so it was bombed over 27 times over the course of the conflict.

          The Peace Line was, several times, found to be too short, so they kept adding to it. It’s currently 42 ft. high, but the bus driver assured us that, with some effort, things can still be thrown over it.

          Yes, the city really is still segregated. The Loyalist areas look like the area around Queen’s. The Republican areas have more green paint, schools named for saints, and signs in Gaeilge, Irish Gaelic. I recognized some simple words, like siopa and fáilte.*    

The city has a definite war-torn look to it, still. There are pretty gardens, murals, and quaint old buildings, with rubble and barbed wire in between. It’s a little bit unsetlling for the International Students who hadn't come prepared for it.

So, on the tour, the sightseeing was interspersed with:

“... and there used to be a bar there, until it was bombed...”

And:

“... that was how the victims were picked... [by whether] they turned right or left...”

The area's history is the main reason I chose to study in Belfast. Northern Ireland, to quote my Irish Studies professor, is not important. It's not big. Not many people died in the Troubles. It's not strategically essential to anyone or anything. But its conflicts, and its peace process, make for an "interesting, English-speaking case study" which intrigues me as a student in Anthropology and Peace Studies. 

These are pictures taken out the bus window: 

This last is the Parliament building. 

* “Shop” and “welcome,” pronounced kind of like “SHO-pah” and “FWAHL-chuh.”