A Vagabond in a War-Weary City

We departed from Galway fairly early, and began driving toward Belfast.  As we were loading, I was telling Gabriel about Tony the cart driver, and how he tried to teach me some Irish while we were driving, but that I couldn't remember how to say it.  The phrase was just How are you?, and Gabriel said that I could sit in the jump seat next to him and he would teach me.  So, leaving Galway, I got to be Gabriel's copilot.  (The phrase is Conas ata tu.  It is interesting how many languages use tu to refer to you.  Since Gaelic is a language of the Celts, who came from Europe, I wouldn't be surprised if there are some shared roots among those languages.)  I was happy as a little clam in the front seat with Gabriel.  There is not remarkably a lot to see between Galway and Belfast, so it was fairly easy, farmland driving.  We chatted a lot, and I got some blogging done as well.  Apparently the second rocks (as they have become colloquially known, for our stop at a second set of rocks that looked exactly like The Burren) was a stop we were required to take, because much like American commercial driving, the chip in the dashboard requires that bus drivers take a certain number of breaks after certain amounts of time, and we were required to take that stop for his chip to be legal.  So there you go.

We rode along quite happily, he and I, singing Irish songs (he played Johnny Jump Up on his iPod, which is one of the songs we learned at the musical pub crawl in Dublin, and he liked that I sang it with him.).  We drove for perhaps an hour and a half before making a pitstop in County Kildare.  Gabriel let me use the microphone to wake everyone up, so I spent the ten minutes before the wake up call prepping what I was going to say.  Everyone hates how aggressively he wakes us up "Hello my little chickeeens!  Wakey wakey at the zoooo!".  So I put on my best Irish accent, and my best flight attendant voice, and I said "Good morning ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for flying Aer Lingus.  It is haapasht 11 local time, here in beautiful County Kildare.  The captain has advised me that we will be landing shortly, for coffee and tea service, and we recommend that all passengers take the opportunity to strain the spuds.  We ask at this time that you please return your seat to its full upright, and locked position as we prepare for landing.  As always, thanks again for flying Aer Lingus."  It went over very well, and everyone was quite amused.

The pitstop was fairly nice, a good little reststop of which there are fairly few in Ireland.  The bathrooms were nice, and a few people got Burger King or coffee before returning to the bus.  I rode with Gabriel for much of the rest of the ride into Belfast.  We stopped for lunch soon after, maybe another half hour on, and I got a little pannini and some apple juice.  I brought Gabriel a cup of soup, because we are best friends now, and also because I wanted to avoid a repeat of the other day.  The man does so much, it is not hard to bring him a little hot soup.

As soon as we crossed the border into Northern Ireland, I felt like there was a shift of energy.  There was nothing marked about the change in scenery, but I just felt like I had left the Republic.  I hadn't thought of Ireland as being the Republic of Ireland until I was in the north.  The little cafe where we got lunch felt different, and after two weeks of adapting to accents, I was surprised at how hard it was to understand them.  Firstly they mumbled, which is always a problem, as my mother is wont to remind me.  But secondly, their accents were definitely different.  The Cork or Dingle accents were thicker, but I understood everyone.  As soon as I was in the north, I had to start asking what.  Anyway, they seemed to find me quite a bother for my stupidity, so it contributed to my feeling that the north was not the Ireland that I came to be in.

Gabriel gave us a crash course on Belfast and Northern Irish history as we approached, and I confess, it is difficult to follow the many different factions of the competing groups.  The IRA, the Orangemen, the Ulster Unionists, the Sinn (shin) Fein party, all of that I could probably explain, but it would take a little time to get them all straight, and their respective allegances.  The highlights are that when the people of Northern Ireland voted to decide which counties were staying with England, and which were becoming part of the Republic, they had unequal representation.  Catholic houses were granted one vote per house, regardless of how many voting age people lived in the house (and since the Catholics often lived in the slums, their homes were often quite full.), while the Protestants were given one vote per voting age person.  Thus, the Protestants, a clear population minority, pushed the vote so that four of the six counties that wanted to be in the Republic, became part of the UK instead. 

Driving across the border was less intimidating than we expected.  There was less protection than at the Canadian border, and not even a guard station.  Toto, who had only gotten a visa to go to the Republic, was concerned that he wouldn't be let into Northern Ireland, but no one at all checked.  As recently as ten years ago, though, there would have been full and elaborate check points at the major roads.

Belfast is an interesting enough city, but I felt on edge upon arrival.  Gabriel gave us a quick drive around, and we saw city hall, and a few churches, and he pointed out the road down which we were not to go.  British flags adorned nearly every building, and he said that it would be politically unsafe to go there, especially at night.  He wanted to remind us that, like every city, there are places where you just don't go, but it still felt very creepy to look down the road and know that that was a street thumbing its nose at all the Catholic Irish in the area.  There was far more graffiti here than in any of the cities I have seen so far.  It feels simultaneously more metropolitan, more English even, and more third world.  This place is so recently on the brink of very real civil conflict, and death in the streets, that you feel the tension in the air.

We dropped our things off at the hostel, Vagabonds.  The room that six of us girls were in was incredibly tight, and there were unfortunately no en suite bathrooms.  The nearest and nicest bathroom was up a half flight of stairs, where in one corner, there were three doors.  One had a full bath, sink, toilet and shower.  One was a half bath, with sink and toilet, and the other door had just the shower.  Making the best of the space, I suppose.  With all of our giant bags, which have gotten quite fat and crazy with all the buying of things and whatnot for the last two weeks, it was very cramped in our room.  At least this place had proper sheets and blankets, unlike the other hostels which have had only comforters.

We just dropped our things, and headed back out to the bus to meet up with Ken Harper, of Black Cab Tours, to show us the main sights and tell the history of the city.  We walked along beside the international mural wall, which is a section of the mural walls dedicated to Irish support for international causes that they deem important enough to require large scale artistic support.  These included murals for a Native American held in jail for 20 years, Palestine, and other such topics.  Around the corner were more, including one featuring dozens of African Americans (among them, a rather roundfaced depiction of Obama), in solidarity with the plight and oppression of the Irish by the English.  There was also one about global climate change. 

We also got to walk through one of the gates of the peace wall.  It's like the Berlin wall, and they sometimes call it that.  The gates close at night, keeping the Protestants in and the Catholics out.  Inside, the curbs are painted red, white and blue, and pennant banners with the British colors fly across the roads between houses.  Among many of the neighborhoods, murals are painted on the sides of tennant housing.  One was called the Irish Mona Lisa, because the barrel of the rebel's gun follows you when you walk by.  It is a very disarming mural, and people live in these houses nearby.  There are new townhomes going in directly across from this morbid Mona Lisa.  We drove past a caravan park of Protestants who were having a silent protest because they are no longer allowed to march through the Catholic neighborhoods, proclaiming their British and Protestant pride.  It was terrifying being in these neighborhoods.  I can't imagine living anywhere near there.  It is honestly as close to a war zone as I hope to ever come.

Ken explained the other flag that flew beside the Union flag, a white flag with a six pointed star and a red hand on it.  He said that it was the red hand of Ulster, the northern province that contains all six of the Northern Irish counties, and a few ones from the Republic.  The red hand of Ulster, or the right hand of Ulster, is the symbol of the Ulster Unionists.  The six pointed star represents the six counties, and the hand is a reference to one of the last high kings of Ulster.  In a competition for the kingship between MacDermott and O'Neill, they proposed a race.  The first person whose right hand crossed the line would be king.  MacDermott, seeing that he was certainly going to lose the race, cut off his own right hand and threw it over the finish line.  Thus, the right, or bloody red, hand of Ulster.

After our tour, which left us all feeling a little shook up, Gabriel led us to a chicken wing place called Ryan's.  It was a bit of a walk, and we separated into quite the long trail along the way.  Leta, who walks rather slowly because of her knee, was second to last to arrive.  Byron got some kind of news the day before via e-mail, and had been in a sober mood all day, and he was the last to arrive at dinner.  He got a phone call from home, and apparently, without going into too much of his grief, one of his very close friends had passed away.  He made some arrangements for distressed traveler, and ended up leaving very early in the morning on Tuesday.  At dinner though, all we knew was that something had happened to Byron, because it was like all the life had been sucked out of him.  It was really very sad, and I didn't realize until then how much of a driving positive force Byron had been in our group.  It was very sad to see him so deflated.

I had dinner with Lauren, Corbin, Kelly and Brayden, and somehow the topic of my being homeschooled came up.  That led, as it often does, to a discussion on how one meets people and dates when homeschooled.  They asked a simple enough question, how many boyfriends have I had, which turned into a very long attempt to remember them all.  Anyway, by the end of it, people had heard more dating horror stories than any of them had ever expected from me, and I don't know if they were traumatized or amused.  I have had some pretty bad dating horror stories.  I won't name names here, but ask me some time about Rocky, Colin, Tony, Kevin (1 or 2), and Alex.  There are some very funny stories, and the Colin story always goes over well, with plenty of cringes.

From there, we just went back to the hostel, and I had a shower in the bathroom that was just a shower, and did battle with the shower head device.  I don't know if the red button actually made warm water or not, and I couldn't figure out how to turn down the water pressure, so my skin was nearly peeled off by the water, which fluctuated between warm, hot, and chilly within moments, and seemingly independent of the status of any nearby showers or toilets.  All in all, probably the strangest shower experience, and I will be grateful for the return to a shower that stays on, and stays one temperature.