woots! its a belated post from notts! and tomorrow i'll be setting off for Edinburgh, Scotland already! haha=D how fast time flies... its March already and in less than a week's time, i'll be all over Europe for my Easter Break!!!=D
so anyway, Belfast is located in Northern Ireland, which is part of uk... took a budget flight from East Midlands Airport in Notts to Belfast... Ryanair was not too bad. seats were okay, flight was smooth, and it was on time! in fact earlier than expected! haha=D and when they touched down at the airport they played this cute victory song thingy (something which you will hear on computer games), followed by an annoucement that they have landed on time, self praising that they are the most punctual budget airlines in europe and blah blah blah...
a day view of city hall with the 'belfast eye' as the backdrop
here's a night view of the same place=)
us and the BIG fish
so, the first day in belfast was spent roaming around the city itself. first stop was City Hall! where we went on a free tour of the city hall, understood about its history and the things going on in city hall... very much like the istana in singapore where you have the top people of the city working in it... next, we visited the Big Fish (cuz we thought it was quite interesting and looked really BIG in the postcard)... but it turned out to be like about 2m tall only and maybe 5 - 6m wide?
imagine that its leaning!=D
haha=D then visited the Albert memorial clock tower, which was supposedly leaning to one side, like the leaning tower of pisa in italy... unfortunately, when we visited that clock tower, we could not find any description saying why it was leaning=S oh wells!
river lagan, peaceful and serene
the murals at the peace line=)
traditional irish food! yummy yum yum!=)
took a stroll down the main river in Belfast - the River Lagan, and we trekked all the way from the east to the west of Belfast to check out part of the Peace Line murals... supposedly drawn out on the brick walls to illustrate the troubles in Ireland (think Protestant vs Catholic conflict you've studied before in Social Studies!=)) and ended the day with a nice sumptuous meal of traditional Irish food at this place called Maggie Mays. i had beef stew, and the highlight of the meal was irish coffee!
the highlight of this weekend trip was of course the Giants Causeway! haha=D some of you all may be wondering why is it called the Giants Causeway...there is a legend that one day the giant of ireland wanted to fight the giant of scotland (ireland and scotland are actually seperated by a channel)... and so he built a causeway over to scotland to seek that giant out... upon arriving at scotland, he found out that the giant was much bigger than him! so he fled back to ireland, and pretended to be a baby while his wife pretended to be the mother... the giant of scotland, then came to ireland to look for his opponent... when he met the wife of the giant of ireland, she told him that her husband was away, and invited him to look at her baby. the giant of scotland was shocked to see such a huge baby and deduced thaif the baby was huge, the daddy must be gigantic!! so he fled back to scotland, destroying the causeway at the same time.hats how u end up with such funny rock formations on both sides of ireland and scotland...
well the truth is such formations were actually due to the lava cooling from millions of years ago, and the action of the extreme heat and cold in this region in the past, that made the formations look like pillars... haha=D quite cool isn't it huh?
after visiting the causeway, we proceeded on to this famous rope bridge in belfast, called the carrick-upon-rede rope bridge (think it should be something like this!=P) well... there's nothing too fascinating about this bridge... its 20m long and 30m high only... yups and it cost 5gbp to cross it... so... haha=D luckily on that day i went, it was free... so we happily crossed it and took loads of pics and video with the bridge! haha=D
peacefull seaside towns...
watching the sun set...
the drive to and from the causeway is a scenic one. lots of nice seaside towns and countryside farms and houses. the area is scattered with lots of bed and breakfast houses.. looks very peaceful... just like the uk version of hawaii... haha=D
authentic irish brekkie! potato and soda bread!=D
the last day in belfast was spent doing a titanic tour... understanding the history of titanic, the shipyard where it was first designed and built, right up to the very day where it was launched to set sail in the seas... next we went on to hunt for more of the peace line murals. they are not exactly on a line... haha=D more like a treasure hunting session, looking for murals on the walls... but it was quite fun! haha=D
okie dokies! thats pretty much all for my irish experience!=) overall its a fun, relaxing trip... and i'm looking forward to my scotland trip tomorrow and hope that it'll be an equally relaxing experience!=)
<3<3<3 hearts for my girlfriend! <3<3<3
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