#With one of the friends being either Scottish or NI or some blend

[kling-akhlami-buhfik]

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[londonlanded]

Week 29

Alright, it’s time for one last hurrah - aka, this week I went on my last trip before the regularity of a Monday to Friday schedule rears its predictable head. 

Monday was a typical workday that ended with a fabulous surprise in the form of my second free Four Seasons massage, courtesy of my lovely friend Pau who wanted to give me a leaving gift in the form of 90 minutes of care that my muscles more than needed. He also passed along the information that ours was the only 5 star hotel that boasts a 5 star spa in Europe, and he encouraged me to take advantage of the other facilities while I was there. 

It was one of the few times I was grateful for London’s early evenings, since it meant the end of my massage coincided with a beautiful sunset that just happened to be best viewed from the sauna. I headed home a happy girl. 

Tuesday took a turn for the strange when I fell quite ill quite quickly, managed to rally enough to meet my friend Giulia at Heathrow but not before questioning calling the whole trip off. No better way to test the limits of my own stubbornness than to give me a stomach bug on my first day of a planned trip. Regardless of my state and pace (bad and slow), I made it to the airport and through our short journey to Belfast City Airport. Waiting for us with open arms (and driving the same car he had the last time I saw him a decade ago, lefthand drive and all), was Keith, one of my dad’s ex-trainees who was born and raised in Northern Ireland before the stint in Toronto that brought him and his young family into our lives. We quickly popped home so I could see his family, and I found myself face to face with two boys, taller than me, both with the goal of following in their father’s medical footsteps. Last time I saw them, my siblings and I were forcing the youngest one to repeatedly say the word “eight” in his adorable accent because we thought it was the funniest thing we had ever heard. Time has one hell of a way of changing, aging people. Keith brought us home and we settled into our hostel for the evening, but not before meeting two Canadians who we realized would also be two of the people that would be sharing our day tour the next day.

Wednesday morning, met Paul our tour guide right beside the Europa hotel, which Keith had pointed out as being the number one most bombed hotel in Europe thanks to the IRA choosing it as its main target. We found out later that it was the number one location for journalists to stay while in Belfast documenting the conflict in Northern Irerland, so any time the IRA wanted to make sure an attack got international attention, it made (contextual) sense to bomb the very place those documenting everything were sleeping. 

We set off, and as we left Belfast proper, the weather changed more drastically than I had almost ever seen. The world went gradually, peacefully grey, before turning black all at once. It was the kind of sky you looked up at and realized you were literally looking at your day’s luck changing. Behind us, bright blue, ahead of us was a Northern Irish storm. Still, we ploughed on, and in spite of Paul’s initial warnings that we’d have to skip our first stop due to the weather, we arrived at the Dark Hedges right on time after he decided we could pull it off after all. 

The Dark Hedges are simply someone’s driveway - the property owner decided to line his drive with arching birch trees and what came of his agricultural endeavours are what are now frequently used as a set for a number of Game of Thrones episodes. The car and foot traffic has damaged a ton of the trees, so the road is now pedestrian only though some locals still drive on it illegally. 

As we approached the mouth of the road, the wind picked up and a murder of crows leapt up from the grassy cornfield to our right, they swarmed and shouted above us as our little group walked under the first of the massive, arching trees. A few seconds later, massive wet snowflakes began to fall on us, and I remember thinking the place had a darkness about it regardless of the Game of Thrones association. 

Up next, Bushmills distillery, the oldest Whiskey distillery in Northern Ireland (note, Whiskey is Irish, Whisky is Scottish). It’s a company that’s managed to weave itself in to the fabric of the country, but it also plays an integral role in the local community. In years where tourism was slow, it kept locals employed, even during times where the entire country’s economy was suffering. This distillery is so important to the people of NI that it’s even on their five pound notes, which I only noticed on our last day in the country while Giulia was paying for lunch. 

On our way out of town, we stopped at Dunluce castle for a photo op, just as the sun began to shine again. Dare I say, I was getting hopeful about the weather? 

15 minutes down the road, Paul let us off at the top of the walkway down to the Giant’s Causeway. You can take a shuttle down for 1 pound, but we felt brave in the newfound almost-sunshine. Ten minutes walking, and you make it down to NI’s number one most well-known tourist attraction, and just as we made it to the bottom, the weather welcomed us enthusiastically. 

Through sideways rain and flying seafoam, G and I clambered all over the hexagonal basalt columns that make the causeway so famous. They were truly one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen, geologists theorize that they’re left over from a volcanic eruption but Paul offered a skeptical ‘well no one’s ever showed me no volcano,’ as his thoughts on that. Amusingly, clambering on top of slippery rocks brought some life back into me that I had forgotten I had, I wound up scaling the stones while G sort of watched me dance with my own demise, armed of course with her camera. 

I’ve genuinely never felt more stupid than I did while standing atop some of those stones, with the wind, rain, and foam flying at me from every direction, I thought I was about to meet my end. Thankfully, the local guards stepped in and pulled us all off the rocks before anyone got too carried away, but they let us have more than a satisfactory amount of adventure before pulling the plug. 

Giulia actually had to pay for the shuttle back to the top of the cliff face since my hands were too numb to sort out my change, we wound up in a local cafe where G ate and I used their fireplace as a personal full-body dryer. While I can’t comment on the food, the ambiance of The Nook more than made up for my inability to feel my extremities. 

With the main event over, I was sort of skeptical I’d get much out of the rest of our day, but I was more than pleasantly surprised with how the rest of our adventure transpired. An hour later, unfazed by the weather at our last stop, we made it to the Carrick-a-rede rope bridge, which marked the end of a 1km pathway from the park entrance. Paul parked and set us free once more, we paid for tickets to cross the 60 foot bridge waiting for us at the end of our walk, and we set off once again. 

The walk actually wound up being the most beautiful part of the day, at least in my opinion, in spite of the weather descending beyond even what it was at the causeway. 

There were literally gale force winds coming at us in every direction, there were hailstones collecting in the rain puddles we were dodging on the unpaved path, we were trying to hold onto railings that weren’t completely anchored into the muddy earth that framed our glistening, stony walkway. 

Having feeling in my hands became a thing of the past, forget being dextrous enough to bother refastening my hood, it’s not like my hair was salvageable anyway. 

Regardless, we were met with some of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen, Giulia’s little pink raincoat made for an easy subject. 

The rope bridge was initially built so that fisherman could make it from one little island over to the mainland, with their fishing gear in tow. A few months ago, the bridge was redone to be made safer and steadier, but before those refurbishments it was actually much more similar to how it was when it was built however many years ago when it was still being used for its initial purpose. The bridge only had a railing on one side so that fisherman could stabilize themselves without having to hoist their fishing gear above shoulder height and out of the way of where a second railing would have been. The modern version of course has two railings, and none of the boards are missing from the footpath either, much to tourguide Paul’s chagrin. 

Unfortunately, once we made it to the bridge, they (expectedly) told us they’d closed the walkway due to the rain, but we still were glad to have made it far enough to see it. On the way back, my Canadian companions caught up to us, one of them was bloodied and the other was sort of confused looking, but her expression was also blended in with a bit of pride. The bloody one announced to us she had just saved a local farmer’s sheep from being tangled in a broken fence, and I’ll admit that there have been few moments where I’ve been prouder to be Canadian than at the moment I was told my countrywoman was playing sheep Jesus. 

A few hours back to the city, G and I braved local NI trains and made it to Keith’s neighbourhood of Holywood (pronounced like the California version oddly enough), where he fed us and took care of us, and ensured the two of us were warmer than we’d been all day. 

Thursday morning while G slept in, I headed downstairs for a tea and wound up chatting to Brett at our hostel's reception, who recommended that we do a Black Taxi tour of the city that morning. For £35, you can take a tour of the city from a local who's lived through its recent past, including the years of tumult that lead up to things being as they are. I'll admit I was quite naive to the state of Northern Ireland before arriving in it, but a quick google got G and up to date before Walter, our driver arrived. 

He started by showing us the area we were in, pointing out Queen's University Belfast as the main landmark nearby. He told us the story of its construction, and said that an identical but smaller version was built in nearby Glasgow. Apparently the smaller one was actually supposed to be built in Belfast, but the plans got swapped by 'accident' and the larger building wound up being put up. It's a beautiful building, and its responsible for attracting most of the people that reside in the area near the hostel, South Belfast. 

From there, the real tour started, and we were shown a side of Belfast we were definitely not expecting. Though the conflict between the Catholic and Protestant communities in Ireland can be traced back hundreds of years, back to when the Protestants were first invited to live in England by the British, the modern cause stems back from a Protestant government in 1969 that was viewed as treating Catholic and Protestant communities unfairly. This government favoured the middle class, and did not allow for many reforms that would have made life easier for those not in it. That in itself might not have been a standalone issue, but the problem was that most of the Protestant population was included in the middle class, so they did not feel the unfairness as heavily as the Catholic, working-class population did. The closest thing the government did to reforming anything was when they put up what are called 'kitchen houses' throughout Belfast, they were called this because while these strings of connected houses had kitchens, they lacked bathrooms entirely. These were built externally, which meant you had to walk across the driveway to make use of communal restrooms. Modern modifications of those kitchen houses can be identified by the fact that they're a long rectangular stretch of conjoined buildings, but moreso by the addition of single small bathrooms at the back of each house in light of the progress that's been observed since they were first put up. 

In any case, the reason this government was deemed unfair seems to be that the Protestant population felt as though everyone was being treated unfairly due to their mostly-middle class view of the state of things, while the Catholic population saw that the government was being much harder on the working-class in light of the fact that they made up the majority of it. This disagreement led to the conflict that still polarizes West Belfast today. This was what inspired the beginning of what's known as 'The Troubles' in 1969. 

Soon after they began, the British stepped in to try and ensure that peace reigned between the two sides. To try and do that, they proposed building a 'peace wall' between the two warring sides, with the intent of leaving it up for 6 months while the conflict settled (spoiler alert, the wall is still up today). It was built on Cooper Street which naturally bisected the two communities. Protestants move slightly north, Catholics slightly south of their newfound border. The British remained involved until 1971, when the Irish Republican Army became hostile, and attacked some of the British soldiers there, at which point they removed themselves from the area as the conflict began to escalate. At the heart of the conflict was a Catholic desire to leave Britain, and a Protestant desire to remain a part of it. 

We started our tour by driving into the Eastern, Catholic side of West Belfast, where we began seeing the first signs that not all was as idyllic as our initial impressions of Belfast led us to believe. Black cabs, identical to those in London, whizzed past us on the street. Walter told us how, during the peak time of conflict, public transport was both unreliable and frankly dangerous. Busses were being burned in protest, and so the IRA responded by purchasing a host of London's black cabs and driving them up and down the main roads themselves. This served a dual purpose, both as a transport system for the citizens that had been left without transport, but also as a way for the IRA to remain informed about everyone's movement throughout the city. Walter said that there's nothing going on that the IRA doesn't know, and that to this day, ex-IRA members drive the cabs on the Catholic side of the wall, even though busses now safely run. 

The two sides of the wall are drastically different in ambiance and aesthetic. On both sides of the wall, local artists have turned to artwork to express their political inclinations. Walter intimated that while there were aspects of their statements he didn't agree with, the art and murals themselves were quite tastefully done. He explained a ton of them but I can't pretend I know every detail, but in brief, the polarization of both sides was palatable in the artwork. It's amazing how close two communities could live to each other while sharing such radically different ideals. The Catholic side had portraits of everyone from Fidel Castro to Che Guevara, there were pro-palestine signs and Irish flags painted beside portraits of hunger strikers who had died, text in Irish language and statements that peace is harder than war when it's not real resolution. The Protestant side was the blunt opposite, there were pro-Israel pieces beside pro-Britain murals, paintings of their lost hunger strikers and statements made by Protestant politicians acknowledging the wrongs of the government and addressing the conflict.

The loudest contrast, at least in my mind, was illustrated by two gardens with identical commemorative purposes, but for people on opposite sides of the same war. On the Catholic side, a garden commemorating lost members of the IRA stands tall near one of the four gates in the wall. On the Protestant side, a garden commemorating people killed by the IRA stands clearly on the main street of that side, they were identical in purpose but completely opposite in content. 

The gate itself spans the entirety of West Belfast and still closes every single night, which Walter says is indicative of the mistrust between both communities. There are four gates, and each one of them is controlled by members of government from each side. One closes at 4PM, 7PM, 8PM and and the final one closes at 10PM. You can still cross from one side to the other after 10PM, but you need to pass through central Belfast in order to do so. It's an inconvenience that's one of the clearest signs that the peace we observed at the time has nothing to do with having reached a resolution, and only to do with having become exhausted with constant and persistent conflict. 

Another element of that stark contrast was that while the Catholic side of the wall was incorporated into people's backyards, made up their fences and was generally undecorated and unmarked both by government and by citizens, the Protestant side was the complete opposite. Perhaps it has more to do with the way the wall was built, but the fact that the Catholic side of the wall is right up against a ton of houses and a factory somewhat limits it in terms of its function as a potential canvas. 

That same limitation does not exist on the Protestant side, in that the wall is built on the far side of Cooper Street away from most of the buildings on that side of the divide. That distance perhaps led to artwork being justified, but regardless of the reasoning, Walter had come prepared with towels to dry the painted wall, and sharpies for us to sign it ourselves. Apparently it's painted over every year, and adding artwork is actually encouraged. Messages of peace, patriotism, hope and everything in between blanketed the blue base coat of paint, G and I added our own two cents to the nearly-covered wall. 

We were dropped off at our hostel to pick up our stuff, and after a moments rest we were up again and off to find a final adventure before g caught her airport bus. We found ourselves at the towns city hall, which actually had a pretty excellent self guided tour, and was stunning enough just in terms of its construction. 

Turns out there’s a lot more to know about Northern Ireland than I imagined. Of note, the entirety of Belfast’s governing body is currently female, and it isn’t even the first time it’s happened as it occurred once before back in 2014. There are still some words that are native Irish in origin that are used colloquially today (for some reason I didn’t take note of any though, not my finest journalism). There are also some remnants of Shakespeare’s English due to the fact that, well, England and its neighbours are an island and therefore somewhat separated from mainland linguistic dilution. I can hardly understand some Irish at the best of moments though, perhaps that’s why? 

There’s also strong desire (or stated desire at least) for peace between the two still-warring sides of the troubles conflict. Like I said, it’s not that peace reigns at the moment because a problem has been solved, it’s more about the maintenance of a ceasefire than it is about having found a solution to what ails both sides. 

Inside city hall was an entire room dedicated to statements from those who had lost people on both sides of the conflict, profound and acute is the desire for peace, the universality of human loss the clear undertone of what we read. 

I know most of you are probably wondering where the titanic stuff is going to come in, hate to disappoint but we elected to skip that part of the city. We did learn a bit while at the city hall, most notably that the titanic sunk only 12 days after leaving port, but beyond that t and I were mostly interested in everybody else the town had to offer. We left city hall and meandered to whites tavern, the second oldest tavern in Belfast.

G caught her bus but I found one more adventure in the form of the linen hall library, which was dedicated to documenting the political comedy that surrounded the troubles themselves. 

The whole four story affair is decorated with tapestries depicting artistic interpretations of both sides of the conflict, and while I had to leave the members area I still managed to find somewhere to sit and enjoy a national geographic while waiting for my turn to set off. 

My flight was a mere 45 minutes long, and before I knew it I was aboard the bus to Edinburgh after having landed in cold and clear Scotland. No borders, no problem, I was with my friend Rachel in the centre of the city within an hour of landing. The next morning, our grand foot tour of the city began, but only after a tea and a coffee at Rach's favourite cafe. From there, we hiked up Arthur's seat, which is probably what Edinburgh is most famous for if not for it being the place Harry Potter was conceptualized and partly written. 

It was a fairly painless hike and the reward was one of the most beautiful views I've seen on any of my travels, especially of a bustling city. 

Rach and I weren't exactly in tip top shape (she was coming down with a cold, I was still running on nearly 0 fuel thanks to my protesting organs) so we took it slow, but we still managed to somehow tally almost 30000 steps worth of exploration that day. We headed down through town to see the gorgeous centre. 

Basically, the entire city looked like the photo below in different sized versions. The whole place is just a connected series of spires, stained glass, and time-stained stone. I wound up taking so many photos Rach started to make fun of me, so here’s just one of them. 

From there, we headed to Dean village, which is pretty much the cutest little area I could ever imagine, and was worth every bit of trespassing we did to snap our photos. 

From there, Rach took me to the Elephant House cafe, which became famous thanks to JK Rowling having penned her first book from the comfort of its cozy back room. Out front, there's actually a metal plaque outlining that JK had been there. 

The vibe inside was actually something I would have dug myself had I had more time to appreciate it - there was even a sign that said something along the lines of "we have no WiFi, talk to each other, pretend it's 1995" which made me smile. When you look out the back window of the place, Edinburgh's castle looms above you, and apparently that was the view that JK saw when she thought of Hogwarts. After seeing the town she used as inspiration for her novel, it all sort of makes sense how Harry's world came to be. 

Rach and I ended the day at a Jazz bar with a couple of her friends, and though I didn't know it at the time, we were at one of the most popular Jazz spots in the city. I suppose that's the magic of a small town though, it's really not hard to hit the best places when everything's so perfectly close together. 

Saturday morning, my last day with Rach, we woke up and stopped at two farmer's markets on the way to the Surgeon's Museum which was beyond incredible if not a little draining considering its jarringly painful-looking content, combined with the fact that it was the most cognitively engaging thing I had done since arriving in London I think. I couldn't take photos because the specimens were human, but I strongly recommend that place to anyone who's in Edinburgh with a few hours and £7 to kill. 

Last but not least, Rachel made sure I had the ultimate taste of Scotland. This dish is called haggis, nips and tatties, and that's short for haggis, turnips, and mashed potatoes. It's served with gravy, and this little trifecta is a delicious, hearty, and earthy meal if I've ever seen one. The haggis takes a second to wrap your head around, but I promise it's at least worth the try. We cleaned the whole plate off of course, I'm not sure how my stomach felt about my first real meal consisting of a combination of oats, sheep organs and suet, but my mouth was pretty happy regardless. 

With two minutes to spare, Rach walked me to my bus and before I knew it, I was back at the airport with years of time to kill (typical me). I was reminded later that evening that no matter the weather on the ground, the world above the clouds can be more glorious than words can convey. 

After landing that evening, I had a quiet shift on Sunday with none other than my little Giulia, who made my return to real life about as palatable as it could have been. 

Next week, a really out of the ordinary dose of luxury I never in a million years imagined I'd be getting! 

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