The BELFAST and the Furious

On Wednesday I took a (surprisingly expensive) fifteen-minute Ryanair flight from Glasgow to Belfast. There, lo and behold, I met my family! They had decided that my travels in Ireland would be a good excuse for them to take a vacation to come and visit me. So from that point to the time they take me to the next WWOOF farm, I’m staying with them (a) in much nicer accommodations, (b) not paying for the accommodations, (c) eating much nicer food, and (d) not paying for the food. And they get to come to Ireland. Everyone wins, really.

So we spent a few days in Belfast. Not a bad city, all-in-all, but there’s not a whole lot of tourist-pleasing things to see. The first evening we hiked up a hill to Belfast Castle – I say hiked, but that’s misleading, as it was simply an asphalt-paved road leading up a relatively shallow incline. The castle was nice, but not what I expected. It was rebuilt entirely in the late 1800s, which means it doesn’t look “ancient” at all. More like a stone mansion, I guess. However, the grounds are very nice, and you’re allowed to wander pretty much anywhere inside the castle itself and enjoy the high-society décor. That night I had my first restaurant meal since June 10, and boy did I enjoy it.

The next day we had the breakfast part of our bed-and-breakfast. I should stop here and mention that Silke (Sill-kuh), the owner of the B&B, is German rather than Irish. Accordingly, instead of an Irish breakfast, we had a German breakfast. Lots of cold cuts in many different varieties of meat (apparently this is the big German thing), a bit of cheese, yogurt with mueslis and fruit, toast with jam and butter, and eggs. Not what I expected, but delicious nonetheless, especially after approximately four weeks of pinhead oatmeal for breakfast.

Afterward, we set out for the city. We explored the city center for a while, at one point stopping in a gallery and meeting Isabella, a Peruvian artist who had lived in Detroit for six years. More on her later. Around lunchtime, we stopped into a pub where I had my first real drink with my parents. My sister, being eighteen and of legal drinking age in the UK, joined us as well. During my time here I’ve been enjoying the occasional Jameson Irish whiskey at pubs, ordering the 12-year-old variety (around £3 for a single). Since my parents were buying me a birthday drink, I decided to splurge and order the 18-year-old Jameson – without asking the price first. My dad pointed out that this could have gone terribly wrong and resulted in spending totally unreasonable amounts of money, but it ended up only costing £8. When I ordered it, I asked for it on ice, which is how I’d been having the Jameson 12. The barkeep gave me a surprised and disappointed look, and informed me that you NEVER want to ruin an 18-year-old whiskey by putting ice in it. I decided to follow his advice and I did not regret it. Good stuff.

We also checked out Queen’s University Belfast, which was a lovely little campus with an impressive, Hogwarts-esque Great Hall. While we were in the university restaurant district, we stopped and got some curry fries. I have mentioned these before, but I would like to re-iterate that they are a great idea and should exist in the United States. I also tried a chocolate stout, which sounded delicious but didn’t do anything for me. Then we popped over to the nearby botanical gardens. By the time we got there all the greenhouses were closed, so we could only walk around the footpath and check out the open-air rose garden. Quite nice, anyway.

After that, we went back over to the gallery to see Isabella’s exhibition opening. It was a single room that was treated as a “large-scale collage” with all kinds of found objects, many of them painted or leafed gold. It was an exploration, she said, of the mixing of her identities – native Peruvian with North American and Irish. As I mentioned, she lived in Detroit for six years, working at the Detroit Institute of Arts, so we had plenty to talk about with regards to Michigan. While we were there, a Northern Irish fellow overheard us mention Michigan and approached us. He introduced himself to us as Ian Fleming – “easy to remember”. Apparently he’d been traveling in the States not too long ago and was trying to make it up to Ann Arbor, but couldn’t. He’s an artist/art professor at the University of Ulster, and over the course of the next hour and a half he told us about his philosophy (labels are bad, among other things) and his magnum opus, wherein he has twelve distinct “characters”, each of whom has very different characteristics, lives in a different place, creates art in a different medium, and concentrates on a different single-word subject. Very interesting stuff – though it was hard to get a word in edgewise! We invited him to join us at dinner, so we went to a highly-recommended Indian place in the university district and got some food. There the conversation became a bit more two-sided, and we talked about all kinds of stuff: cooperative living, travel, more philosophy, differences between Irish and American culture, etc.

I'm gonna start delaying entries now, so that I have interesting things to tell you for a while once I'm on the new farm (two days from now!). So 'til next time!