Today, I go overboard describing the food we ate.

We woke around 7:30am and, since our supply of cereal and toast had run out, headed into the city centre for breakfast and coffee at a café that was ironically (for us, at least) set on appearing quintessentially American (New York references, pictures of Sinatra, “American-Style Bagels” and so on). Our first choice, a French café next door to this one, was, naturally, not terribly concerned about opening when it said it would. How very French indeed.

We got to the bus station with only a half hour wait before the next bus to Belfast, and after a 3-hour drive, arrived in Belfast, where we are now. We grabbed lunch at Subway (cheap + vegetables), and checked into our room at Kate’s B & B, near Queen’s University. It was exactly what we expected—cozy, cluttered, un-fussy and friendly. Unexpectedly, however, our room turned out to have three beds in it (one twin and two singles), a loveseat, a few chairs, a TV and a shower and sink. (Seeing the superfluous beds, Brian kept fretting that someone else would be sharing our room with us, and tensed up every time we heard footsteps near our door. He’s since relaxed a bit, and has accepted the fact that we’ve simply ended up in a room normally reserved for families.)

After dropping our stuff off, we embarked on a rambling walk around Belfast. We went into the city centre and around the University, and picked up two tickets for a bus tour the following day. When dinner time hit, and the hunger pangs started, we made our way toward a restaurant our travel guide touted as affordable, popular and tasty. It might have been popular, but the other two adjectives don’t reflect our experience there—the service was inattentive (and we’re really not fussy, and usually very understanding of servers given Brian’s experience in that line of work), and the food ranged from tolerable to inedible.

Now, those of you who know us well know that we’ll eat just about anything. Did it fall on the floor? We’ve got it, don’t worry. Is it past its best-before date? That’s just a guideline anyway—smell it, and if it’s not too funky, we’ll take care of it. Stale, bland, broken, unidentifiable, discarded, half-eaten, whatever. If you know us, you also know that we clean our plates, especially at restaurants. We even pocket the packets of butter sometimes, especially while on vacation. But at this restaurant, I left half of my entrée, and Brian abandoned ship with a handful of fries and a chunk of burger still on his plate. At the risk of sounding like a couple of restaurant critics, we’ll describe the meals for you.

I should explain that the “jacket” potato (baked potato, for you regular folk) was a common menu item across Scotland and Ireland. Restaurants tended to serve them with a few different kinds of toppings—cheeses, veggies, chilli, and so on—and we even found a place in Edinburgh that served nothing but baked potatoes with every combination of toppings imaginable. I’d been meaning to try one, so I chose the “Prawn Marie-Rose” jacket potato at this particular spot. I was imagining fresh, sautéed prawns in a buttery, creamy sauce on top of a big, steaming potato. What I got was a big, steaming potato indeed, but it was topped with a huge, sloppy glob of cold shrimp (the tiny kind you get in a can), which were swimming in a thick, sickening sauce I can only describe as mayonnaise mixed with lard and cream. The “house salad” keeping my potato-from-hell company was an innocent bed of lettuce, topped with a mushy mixture of shredded cabbage, carrot, and that awful lardy-mayo sauce again.

Brian’s burger was equally puzzling. It had no condiments, in contrast to my meal, which was nothing but condiments. The thick, beef patty, which would have been a perfect candidate for grilling, was obviously deep-fried, so it had a thick, chewy “skin” on the outside, and a greasy, soft centre. His fries were so soaked in oil he had a hard time containing the mess.

The saving grace was the Cheesy Garlic Soda Bread we started with (it’s hard to screw up bread, cheese and garlic), but even that made us feel kind of guilty—it would take a lot of Sweatin’ to the Oldies with Richard Simmons to undo the damage done by that dish alone. To top it all off, the chatty girls overseeing the place undercharged us by 4 pounds (fantastic, really), and then short-changed us by 1 pound as if to claim the tip they knew they wouldn’t be getting. Oh well. We came out of it feeling a little queasy and angry at our guide book, but the 3 pound “discount” softened the blow.

Feeling let down and betrayed—alone in this new place, still hungry, on the verge of severe indigestion and anticipating an urgent trip to the bathroom—we were prime targets for the 2-pound pints at the Empire Pub’s happy hour. We drowned our sorrows (quickly, as we only had a half-hour before the prices went up) in a second “meal” of Guinness, and after chugging two each, the memory of our disappointing dinner was almost erased. We chatted up two girls sitting next to us (one Canadian, one Irish, both teaching English to Italians… in Ireland… follow?) and ended up getting pretty tanked with them. We staggered back to our room, had a snack, and fell asleep.