Well, we sure got burned yesterday with our trip out of town, but we concluded it was a strategic mistake and decided to make another trip, but this time doing it our way. Browsing through number of leaflets we picked up on the Dublin bus station, we saw that there is a frequent bus line to Belfast and that we could visit it for measly 20 EUR.
First, acknowledgement of ignorance: when someone mentions Belfast, I think IRA, conflict, bombs etc. I believe that’s a typical attitude of someone browsing through newspapers but not really paying much attention and is very lazy and in the end of the day, stupid point of view. The reason I can easily recognize it and admit it, is because even today, some 15-ish years after the end of conflict in Croatia, I have some smart and educated people from Europe asking me compasionately “How are things in Croatia nowadays?”, meaning of course, “Are you still shooting at each other? Do you dare to get out of your house?” etc. So yes, even though I did know that the conflict (or “Troubles” as it is referred to in Ireland) has ended years ago, I wasn’t really sure what to expect of Belfast. I definitely didn’t expect anything dangerous, but didn’t really expect what we found there either.
The truth is, after a pleasant 2,5-hour bus drive we found ourselves in a beautiful city of Belfast and the gorgeous sunny weather only emphasized the positive impression. In those short seven hours there we found Belfast to be beautiful and vibrant, very walkable and friendly. Certainly, spending such a short time in any city doesn’t allow you to explore the place in much detail so we more or less just wandered around with no particular plan.
With one exception.
I really wanted to see famous Belfast murals, many of which actually have nothing to do with politics. However, because of very limited time, we took a walk to Shankill Road, a Loyalist quarter in west Belfast. It’s just a short walk from city centre so within minutes we saw dozens if not hundreds of Union Jacks fluttering all over the place. If you’ve ever been in some smaller town in UK, or even some of the suburbs of London, then you know what Shankill Road looks like. The road is lined with private houses and businesses of all kinds and considering it was a sunny early afternoon it was full of people going around their business. Pretty standard and quite pleasant.
The thing which made the whole experience special for me is the overall feeling of, not sure what would be the right word here, perhaps commitment. The place is covered in UK flags, and those murals I was after are quite intense. They seem to either express mourning and respect for the people fallen in the conflict with Republicans, or celebrating one (para?)military unit or another. Comparing that to the situation in Croatia where after the war general tendency was always to calm things down, not to explicitly express anger or frustration with things past, here it looked like, although peace accord was signed years back, the antagonism is alive and well, and there’s no intention of letting it go.
Frankly, most of the time I was a bit worried someone might come over and complain about me taking pictures as if their political problems are reduced to mere tourist attraction. Nothing of a kind happened so eventually we walked along the road connecting Shankill Road to Falls Road which is a Republican quarter. Along the way we came to a large wall with gates which apparently get closed, effectively cutting off connection between Shankill and Falls, at the times of tension.
On the Falls Road things were not as obvious as in Shankill, most likelly because we reached it at the lower point, so in order to see more we should have walked a bit more away from the center for which we didn’t have enough time. Again, there were some murals which I photographed hell out of, but after that we moved back towards the center.
There, being quite hungry, we had something called Ulster Fry which resembles a lot to an English breakfast, meaning a lot of greasy sausages, pancakes, eggs and other ingredients all of which had common denominator that they efficiently clog arteries. It was delicious 🙂
Not having too much time, we just took a peek at famous yellow cranes in the old Belfast shipyard where Titanic was built (I loved the T-shirt saying “It was fine while in Belfast” or something like that), had a coffee and wrote postcards (which eventually we sent from Dublin since we couldn’t ind any stamps) and headed to bus station.
