An Excursion to the North!

Well it’s Wednesday night and all of us Cottage 3 girls are sitting around our small fireplace in our living room trying to stay warm, procrastinating our homework, and reminiscing about our amazing Northern Ireland excursion we had this past weekend. We’ve recently had a pretty drastic drop in temperature as we enter the Irish winter, and we are starting to get slightly concerned about how we are going to stay warm for the next month. If it’s any indication of how successful we are so far, we used two of our electricity coins today before 2 o’clock. We’re working on it. Along with the cold, we’ve also been experiencing the rain of the Irish winter. It feels like it rains for 20 of the 24 hours of each day, so we’ve gotten over the idea of being dry…. ever. Despite being in the throes of winter, we still continue to have amazing experiences here in Ireland, and our excursion to Northern Ireland this past weekend was one to remember.

We started off our excursion by going to Derry, which was an absolutely amazing experience. Derry is the birthplace of Halloween and hosts the largest Halloween festival in the world, so we had heard a lot of exciting things about it and we were all anxious to experience it for ourselves. Every time one of our profs, the people from the Park Lodge, or any Ireland native found out we were going to Derry for Halloween, they would get so excited about how amazing it was and all the fun we were going to have, so there had been a lot of hype about the evening. We arrived in time to change our currency to pounds, grab something to eat, and then change into our costumes and head to the large Halloween parade that kicks off the festivities. I was all dressed up in my pirate attire, and as Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays, I was so excited to see my first Halloween parade. We had been told that there would be upwards of 50,000 people in the city for the festival, and we were not disappointed. People were lining the streets for the parade, and it was then that we started to see how big this festival was truly going to be. The parade was amazing with dancers, floats, marching bands, bag pipes, entertainers, and every costume you could imagine. We’re used to parades for the Fourth of July or homecoming in the United States, so this was something so unique and new and I absolutely loved it. I actually did okay with all of the masks surprisingly, and if anything, the masks that a couple guys from our trip were wearing scared me the most. After the parade, we headed down the street for some Halloween fireworks. These were amazing as well and accompanied with music, so again it was awesome to have so much hype over Halloween in a way that it is not celebrated in the US. When the fireworks were over, we hurried over to a pub called the Metro that we had been given a tip to go to by one of the girls working in our hostel. She told us that if you don’t get in a pub right away, there’s so many people in town for Halloween that you’ll never be able to get into one. We stayed there for the rest of the night and had a blast, as literally every single person, young and old, was in costume and it was a great bar with a fun, Halloween atmosphere. Being in Derry for Halloween was a once in a lifetime experience, and as such a big lover of Halloween, I am so glad I got to experience it. If you love Halloween as much as I do, it should definitely be on your bucket list.

The next day we had a more intellectual and informative day in Derry, but I absolutely loved it and I had such a memorable experience. We started our day by visiting the Apprentice Boys Museum, which was a very interesting experience. I won’t go into too much of the historical detail because it gets rather complicated, but our Northern Ireland trip was very much focused on The Troubles that Ireland has experienced. To very much over-simplify the situation, there has been division between the Protestant Unionists in the north who consider themselves a part of England, and the Catholic Nationalists in the south who want a free and united Republic of Ireland. This first museum we visited would be sympathetic with the first of these views, as they celebrate a historical event in which the Protestants in Derry held off the invasions of the Catholics. Because our program is based in southern Ireland and we have the closest relationships with people from the south, I think it was good for us to hear from an organization with opposing views, but it was also kind of uncomfortable for us, or at least for sure for me, because I was inclined to disagree with what they were saying. The man at this museum was very proud of the English presence that is in Northern Ireland, and he and his organization are all about promoting those views and encouraging loyalist attitudes. After visiting this museum, we did a complete 180 and visited the Museum of Free Derry. Even before we entered the museum, we could tell this area of Derry was very different from where we came, because there were nationalist murals and the large stone sign reading “You Are Now Entering Free Derry.”

The Free Derry Museum was one of the most memorable places I have visited on this entire trip. Before arriving in Ireland, we were required to watch the movie Bloody Sunday, which I will very briefly describe for my American readers who may not be aware of this event. Bloody Sunday is referring to a day in 1972 in Derry in which a peaceful civil rights protest by Catholic nationalists turned into a tragedy where 13 participants were gunned down and killed by British soldiers even though they were not armed. Many of these people were very young, 17 or 19 years old, and this event is a very delicate subject for many Irish people to this day. The tour started out with the shocking introduction of our tour guide, who was actually the brother of the youngest person who was killed on Bloody Sunday. It was such a privilege and humbling moment to have someone telling us about this event who was actually there and who had even lost a family member in this tragic event. I found the museum so sad, somber, and also incredibly interesting. It outlined the history of the city of Derry and how the civil rights movement eventually escalated to the Troubles that Northern Ireland continues to experience today. The exhibit on Bloody Sunday truly had the biggest impact on me, as there were recordings playing of the shootings and aftermath, handwritten testimonies by the survivors, and even artifacts, clothing, and other objects that had actually been there on Bloody Sunday. We saw the large civil rights flag that had dried blood stains on it from when they draped it over the bodies of the dead. We saw actual pictures of the victims, as well as the clothes they were wearing with the blood stains and bullet holes. It was an outstanding experience that I could have never gotten by reading about it in a book or hearing a lecture about it in class. It really started to make me understand why some Irish people are so passionate about The Troubles and all of the division between the north and the south. One artifact that really took my breath away was a letter that was on display, which was written by a British soldier to the parents of the teenager he killed. I have posted a picture of it on Facebook, and it really is worth reading rather than me explaining it. The lack of empathy and the sheer hatred expressed in the letter shocked all of us, and it is something I will never forget. Even the location of the museum had significance, as it is placed right in the middle of where Bloody Sunday occurred. Afterwards we were given a map that showed where all 13 of the victims had died, and several of them were on the street directly in front of the museum. It was such an eerie feeling to be standing in the place where all of this occurred, but it was also the absolute best way to understand the conflict. We ended our tour of Derry by walking along the walls that have divided the city for hundreds of years, at which time we also walked along the Protestant side of Derry which is completely different from the other. Just by crossing over a wall, you experience completely different murals, curbs painted with the British colors, and British flags flying everywhere. It is hard to believe that such a divided people live in such close proximity, and this visit was truly one of those great cultural learning moments that you could only ever get by studying abroad and I am so grateful for it.

After our two amazing days in Derry, we headed to Belfast for the rest of our excursion. On our way there we made a stop at the Giant’s Causeway, which was an amazing sight to see. I’m sure my explanation won’t do it justice, so you’ll have to see my pictures, but it is an amazing, natural formation of rectangular and hexagonal rocks that formed by a volcano. Unfortunately for us, it was a very rainy and windy day, so we had to use extra caution when climbing these rock formations that were made up of very slippery rocks. I had a couple close calls where I feared I was going to fall to my death in the ocean, but in the end I kept my footing and was able to enjoy this amazing sight despite the wind and rain that we are getting so accustomed to in Ireland. The rest of our evening after arriving in Belfast was pretty relaxed, with a great dinner and a visit to one of my favorite pubs in Ireland; Filthy McNastys, the name of which I don’t think will ever get old to me.

Our next day in Belfast was another amazing first-hand educational experience similar to our second day in Derry. We started our morning with mass at a beautiful Catholic church on the west, or the Catholic, side of Belfast. Afterwards we were able to sit down with one of the priests at the church and talk with him about his personal efforts and efforts of the church to aid the peace mission in Northern Ireland. I very much enjoyed listening to him talk about the Troubles, and he was very passionate about the fact that all Christians should be ashamed of these happenings and that the people on both sides of this conflict should be working towards understanding and reconciliation. After our time at the church, we went on the “Black Taxi” tour of Belfast. We were split up into groups and literally put into black taxis, and then our driver took us around to significant sites on both the Protestant and Catholic sides of Belfast. There was one very interesting wall on the Catholic side of Belfast that held dozens of murals about current issues in Ireland and around the world, which is updated somewhat regularly as new issues come up. Then on the Protestant side, we were able to see and actually contribute to the graffiti and murals that cover the wall that separates the Catholics and Protestants. I was pretty excited when one of the cab drivers pulled out a bottle of spray paint and I was able to paint my initials on the wall. One of the things that had the biggest impact on me was not one of the actual stops. It was actually on our way to the wall, when we went to cross between the two sides and we had to turn around and go a different way, because our driver discovered that the gate had been closed early for some reason. This was when I really realized how divided the city is, and it was so weird to think that there are actual gates along the wall that prevent people from coming and going in-between during certain hours of the day. Division like that is something that we don’t deal with at all in St. Joe, Collegeville, or any of the hometowns we come from. It was a situation that I have read about in books, but until you actually experience it for yourself, you will never actually know how that kind of environment makes you feel.

After we were done with our taxi tour, a group of us decided to lighten up our evening a bit and head down to Titanic Belfast to visit the Titanic Museum. I am so glad we took the time to do this, because I thought it was one of the best museums I’ve ever been to and it was such an amazing experience. The museum was incredibly interactive, and it walked us through the very beginning of how the Titanic was made and what it was like in Belfast at that time, to the discovery of the ship at the bottom of the ocean. There was a “roller coaster” ride through what the shipyard would have looked like, a virtual tour through the inside of the Titanic, models of what the different cabins would have looked like, stories of both survivors and those who lost their lives, copies of the messages sent out while Titanic was sinking, and so much more. The actual museum itself is even built so that each of the four corners resembles the actual size that the Titanic was, so you can get a scale of how massive she was. It was just a very cool experience that is unique to Belfast, and it was amazing to be standing in the place that the Titanic was launched and built.

I think this is finally the place where I can wrap up this very lengthy blog post. I am very much aware of how long this has gotten, but this was one of those excursions that was much more focused on what it could teach us, than the random, fun touristy things that we could do. I know that I still didn’t do some of these places or events justice, but I wanted to at least try to give a sense of how big of an impression this trip left on me. I hope it was at least interesting for my American readers, and that you got a little more insight to the history of the area I’ve been living in and experiencing for the past two months.