The Idiot's Guide to Belfast

Belfast and the Boyne Valley

Disclaimer: This post, and all my blog posts, merely represents my opinion, from the limited perspective of an American student visiting a foreign country and a foreign political, religious and social climate. I do not claim my experience to be representative of any larger truths beyond my own personal feelings and initial reactions.

We'd been talking about getting up to Belfast for ages. It just so happened that, last Tuesday night, a woman in the Irish School of Ecumenics was giving a talk on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict up in Belfast. We organized a crew. Me and Pip, and our friends Seamus, Corey, Sarah, and Ashley.

Pip finished his essay, printed it out, shoved it under our professor's office door, and we stepped out into the sunlight. It was time for a road trip.

The six of us raced up to Belfast in two cars for the 2 1/2-hour trip. When you cross the border into Northern Ireland, the kilometers turn to miles, the license plates turn to yellow, and the road falls apart. The motorway we were on became a two-lane traffic jam, riddled with potholes and construction. I had been in the North before, but only out west, where there was hardly any traffic. Now it was a nightmare.

We arrived in Belfast just in time for rush hour. As you make your way into the city, you immediately think: this isn't Dublin. The gray buildings and barren landscape give the impression of some sort of desert post-apocalypse. The drivers were nuts, beeping and running us off the road (maybe because we had Republic plates and not UK plates). We got off the motorway, lost with really vague Google Map directions, and asked at a garage for help.

This was West Belfast, at one time easily one of the most dangerous places in Europe. Police stations were actually bunkers, surrounded on all sides by concrete barriers and barbed wire fences. Security cameras were perched on every street corner. A couple times we pulled over to the side of the road, to ask passersby for directions — and people flat-out ignored us, walking quickly away.

We made it to our Israeli-Palestinian talk (a topic I thought ironically fit our present setting), and met a bunch of Northerners. The Belfast accent is so thick. I'm not going to stereotype. But it's a bit like the other Northern experiences I've had. There's that question of where you're from, right away. The featured speaker introduced herself to the room and said she was from County Clare (in the South), and then sheepishly added, "so take that as you will." Who says that? That's Belfast.

The lecture was good though. Lots of "tea and toast."

Afterward, we drove down to a student hostel near Queen's University, which has been described to me as the Trinity College of the North. Pip once lived a street or two over, and he was familiar with the whole area. Seamus, Corey, Sarah, Ashley and I walked into the hostel a little late. We found Pip chatting with the owner, sitting by the fire and drinking tea, with two little dogs running around the room. We knew right away this was the perfect place.

We set our stuff down and walked outside. It was already nighttime, and we were starving. Pip knew of a great place for cheap food. We walked through the college neighborhood, and made our way to a place called Wetherspoon's. Pip calls it the "Ryan Air of pubs," because it serves the cheapest food and drinks imaginable. Four pounds for steak, chips, and a pint. No kidding. All of Belfast was so cheap. £1.50 pints. I felt like I was back on Pitt's campus.

We went out to a pub after dinner. Even though it was a Tuesday night, it was jam-packed. I later remembered it was Mardi Gras. Pip happened to randomly know the bouncer of the pub (of course). We got into the back and found an empty table amidst the crowd. The bass was pounding and the music was so loud that we had to yell at each other to hear, and eventually we just gave up. We ended up leaving there around 1 AM, before beelining it over to a chipper for a late-night snack. We sat by the fire in the hostel with our burgers and chips and told stories and met the other people in the rooms.

It's weird though. Anything you do, people seem to judge you for it. You pull out your wallet and have euros in there, and you can feel the eyes burning into you. It's all so stressful. Everything you do could have potential political implications. Seamus and I were talking about it. The people on the street are more aggressive. The drunk college students at the chipper were confrontational and angry.

The next morning, we woke up in the hostel in our bunk beds and stumbled downstairs to hot porridge. The owner was up, and he made us tea. We decided to wander down the road a bit to see the campus of Queen's University.

What a cool campus. It was founded in 1845, and the brick buildings are really nice. It's still got an old college feel to it, that you just don't find too often in the States. There's a big park nearby with a museum and a conservatory. We explored around a bit, as we waited for our taxi to show up. We were going to take a black taxi tour.

Everyone says, when you go to Belfast, take a black taxi tour. Our driver showed up and introduced himself, dryly and without any enthusiasm, and the six of us piled into his van. He sounded serious and severe, as he drove us into West Belfast. No jokes. No nonsense. We realized right away that this wasn't going to be a joy ride.

We drove first into the Protestant area off the Shankill Road. This was the area of the Shankill butchers, men who would go around driving late at night, capturing, torturing and brutally murdering random Catholics (and Protestants too). I can't go into details, because it literally makes me sick.

We got out and wandered around the area, seeing the murals, taking pictures of paintings dedicated to men like Oliver Cromwell. I can't think of a more despised figure in Catholic Ireland. Cromwell hated Catholicism, and he massacred thousands of Irish men, women and children in the 17th century. And here he was painted on a mural, decorated as a hero of Ireland. Other heroes dotted the sides of other buildings. It felt more like provocation than genuine admiration.








We got back in the van, passing through the division between Protestant and Catholic Belfast. Our tour guide told us that if there was ever a scuffle, police would sound a siren at the top of the wall, rather than going into the areas themselves. People then had exactly two minutes to run to the other side of the wall, back to their respective sides, or the gates would lock them out, stuck on the wrong side. They were running for their lives, he said. He spoke matter-of-factly and without emotion. Otherwise they would be killed mercilessly.

"You don't have to be a terrorist to live here," he said. "But it helps."

We stopped at the "peace wall", which still separates the two areas, and stretches miles and miles into the countryside, dividing people like dogs in a kennel. He handed us a marker and invited us to leave a message on the wall. We stepped out, and stared up at the thing. Poetry, lyrics, personal messages, and prayers were all jotted down in different languages, as far as the eye could see. Quotes from Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Bill Clinton stood side-by-side with notes scribbled in children's handwriting. It was at one and the same time inspiring and bone-chillingly sad.

Oh, and here's a car that was lit on fire this morning, our taxi driver pointed out. Debris lay all over the road and sidewalk. A puddle of water leftover from the fire hose drained slowly into the storm drain. What???!!!

Now in Catholic Belfast, we drove over toward the Falls Road. Suddenly we realized it was Ash Wednesday. Everyone on the street had a giant black cross smudged on their forehead. If there's one day a year when you can tell Catholics from Protestants, it's Ash Wednesday. And here we were. In Belfast. What a strange coincidence.

It was so sad. Again, I realized that you can't do anything here without being political. Wearing a cross on your forehead becomes confrontational, whether you mean it to be or not. It's all in the eye of the beholder, as they say.

We passed by a hospital. Due to all the knee-cappings that have occurred over the years, our tour guide told us that the hospital on the Falls Road is the worldwide leader in knee reconstruction.

There were murals here too. On the side of the Sinn Féin office, with a GIANT "Sinn Féin" sign outside, was a mural dedicated to Bobby Sands. Bobby Sands was a prisoner in the IRA who went on a hunger strike and died in 1981, directly challenging Margaret Thatcher. He was even elected to Parliament before he died, from inside prison. A Republican hero.

But clearly he was also a criminal who assisted in bomb plots and provided support for killing civilians. The man was in prison for a reason. But here he was, on a mural, painted alongside the likes of Gandhi and King? It was disgusting. Would Gandhi or King support violence to advance their cause? The answer is painfully obvious.

We brought this up to our taxi driver, and he wasn't exactly impressed. He changed the subject. Our taxi driver told us a personal story: that as a young man he had carjacked buses when the Troubles began, parking them at the entrances to Catholic neighborhoods and lighting them on fire to serve as blockades against the British.

That was the end of the tour.

We needed to get out of there, as soon as possible. We decided to leave Belfast and drive back down to Dublin, pronto.

On the way south, we stopped by a very special place to unwind a little bit. There's a valley in Ireland, just north of Dublin, that contains some of the most important monastic and prehistoric sites in Europe. We drove through winding roads, into the forest, far away from civilization, until we reached a place called Monasterboice. This was the Boyne Valley.

The most important high cross in Ireland stands here, from the 9th century. It is covered on all sides with Bible stories, which would have been used by the local priest as a way of teaching the illiterate parishioners. It is nearly perfectly preserved, and stands 18 feet high. It is said to be Ireland's greatest contribution to European sculpture.

It was easy to see why those early Christians had chosen this site. It was beautiful. The sun was dropping in the horizon, but the hills and bushes were a deep green. Nature seemed to be slowly overtaking the stones. The crosses were wearing away with time. The round tower of the monastery was disintegrating and the church walls were crumbling to pieces. But there were modern new gravestones in the cemeteries, with flowers freshly-placed. We wandered around the cemetery, passing from ancient Celtic crosses to small slabs of stone, in complete silence. The wind blew gently in the barren trees. The place felt so... holy.

We drove just down the country road to another important Christian site, called Mellifont Abbey. The whole valley has been religiously significant, since prehistoric times, but this particular monastery was basically a university for centuries until the Dissolution of the Monasteries under King Henry VIII. The ruins were gigantic. I can only imagine what it used to look like.

There is an important collection of neolithic ruins as well in the valley. There are three main tombs, surrounded by standing stones and henges. The prehistoric ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The whole complex dates to the 35th century BC — that's older than the Pyramids.

We walked on top of one of the mounds, one that had caved in, called Dowth. From the top we could see the entirety of County Meath, spotting old churches and farmlands, and the mound of Newgrange, not far in the distance, the most famous Irish prehistoric site. We would have gone there, but it was closed. You can go inside and see the inner chamber and the prehistoric artwork. Once a year, at Winter solstice, a beam of light enters the innermost chamber and illuminates the entire room. You can enter a lottery to try to be in the crowd for that moment. It is supposedly spectacular.

Here's a 360-degree view of the inside.

We took the long way back home, searching for warm country pubs for dinner, until we found a place in the middle of nowhere with a fire and good food. The roads leading to it looked kind of like a driveway, with grass poking up in the middle of the road. They have a name for that kind of path here: a "boreen".

I was glad to be back in Dublin.