The Bells Ring Fast Here
- Dec 27, 2016
- 3 min read
Our trip to Northern Ireland began with waking up at 5:30am, catching a 6:45 train, switching trains twice, taking a cab from the train station to the ferry station/harbour/boaty-place and at last getting on the 8-hour ferry ride across the sea to the Emerald Isle. Allow me to stop here and describe the ferry, because good lort, that ferry was probably the highlight of the Ireland trip and we weren’t even in Ireland yet. There were two separate places where you could order food, and spinny chairs which kept me amused for hours, and –luxury of luxuries- a movie theatre, where we watched Secret Life of Pets (there’s an hour and a half of my life I can’t get back) and X-Men Apocalypse (two hours well-invested.) The only downside, of course, was that I’d had two hours of sleep the night before and Josie had had zero, and napping on the floor and in theatre seats when you have at last given up on Secret Life of Pets ever presenting a clever plot point is just not sufficient to compensate for such copious amounts of exhaustion. Please ignore the fact that that was a run-on sentence. Happens to the best of us.
Anyway, we got an adorable Airbnb in Belfast that night and got our dinner from the chippy down the road. Jeremy got a chip bap, which is literally just chips (thick-cut fries) on a hamburger bun, confirming the theory that citizens of the United Kingdom will make a sandwich out of anything. And then, at last, I got to fall asleep in a real bed, something I’d been longing to do since the dawn of creation.
Our day in Belfast started out with an exploration of the Christmas markets. Belfast also has lots of very cool graffiti which we admired as we wandered the city. We spent the afternoon having a look inside various cathedrals, which were all very grand and beautiful. I lit one of those candles they have for you to stick in the little candelabra things and said a prayer, so I guess I’m Catholic now. Then again, at a different cathedral I dipped my fingers in the holy water in the christening basin, so that probably caused me to have my Catholicism revoked.
Our next big adventure started when we saw a sign for a graveyard and decided to check it out. When we got there, the gate was padlocked, but there was a mysterious man standing on the other side who offered to let us in. Because we had Jeremy with us, and his male presence caused the chances of us getting murdered to plummet from 90% to 10%, we agreed to follow a stranger into a cemetery. As you have probably guessed by the fact that I am writing this blog, the man did not murder us. He did offer us cigarettes, which was rather exciting. All you good home-schooling moms reading this will be happy to know that I declined his offer. I’m going to wait until I’m 80 to start smoking, because I’ve always been intrigued with the idea, and by then the fate of my lungs will scarcely matter because I won’t be long for this earth anyway. Anyway, back to Graveyard Man. He was the caretaker of the cemetery, and he was very knowledgeable about all the people buried there, which including various members of some sort of rebellion in the 1800’s. They were apparently all quite famous, so I pretended I knew who they were whenever he talked about them. There were also bodies bricked up in the cemetery walls from when cholera ravaged the city and the grave diggers didn’t have time to bury the dead properly before they themselves dropped dead. It was a very interesting and historical place, but it’s not actually open to the public, so we were quite lucky to have been given a tour, and now I can say that I have been to a secret Belfastian graveyard and I know secret Belfastian things.
After our secret cemetery tour, we went back to the Christmas markets and rode the carousel because no-one could tell us no. We looked around the stalls a bit more and bought a few wares, and then somehow, at a German meat stall, we ended up buying £15 worth of sausage and salami. I still don’t really understand why, but Josie just declared that we needed sausage, so I guess we needed sausage. So, having stocked up on dried meats, we headed out of the city, got a good night’s sleep, and set off on the next leg of our journey which would take us up to the Giant’s Causeway and the coast.
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