Today, we learned that brick walls with barbed wire are still brick walls with barbed wire, no matter what you call 'em.

My first thought this morning, waking up with a dry mouth, a slight headache and my makeup all over my face, was kill me. My second, immediate thought was wait. Let me eat breakfast, then kill me. You see, Kate’s is known for the “heart attack on a plate” the owner serves guests for breakfast. A full “Ulster Fry”, consisting of sausages, bacon and egg, fried tomato, soda bread, toast, and coffee or tea, waited for us when we awoke, and it was just the antidote for the previous night’s indiscretion.

We hauled ourselves away from the table and set out on the town, doing a bit of window shopping before hopping on one of those big, red, open-topped tour buses and doing a big loop around the city. Overall, it was pretty informative, and for the price we paid, we couldn’t complain. The route went through the Falls and Shankhill neighbourhoods, two of most infamous districts from Belfast’s ‘Troubles’. The two areas are separated by “peace lines”—hulking, concrete walls lined with barbed wire—and are home to the political murals for which Belfast is well-known. The curbs in front of some of the houses are still painted to indicate whether the family living in each is Protestant or Catholic, and politico-religious slogans, flags and symbols are everywhere, letting interlopers like us know exactly where we were.

Some of the buildings still bear the scars of bullets, rockets and serious vandalism, and every street, every corner, every building has a story to tell (like the statue of justice, above, who had her scales stolen). Walking around in these neighbourhoods, as we did later, on our own, we passed people the same age as us who had likely seen so much bloodshed, hatred and struggle by the time they were in their early teens. While this generation is purportedly more open-minded than their parents, and many are less invested in upholding the divisions wedged between the unionists and nationalists of previous generations, there are undeniable numbers of young people who believe very deeply in carrying on the fight. We can’t even begin to understand the complexity of these tensions, but walking through the city and talking to some of its people opened our eyes to a situation we knew nothing about before.

After getting off the bus, we grabbed a pretty early dinner at Subway again, if only for the sake of knowing that what we ordered would look and taste exactly like we expected it to. We walked back to our room and hung around for a bit until we got bored, and then went back out for a walk around the neighbourhoods we’d driven through earlier in the big, tacky bus. We felt safe and not unwelcome as we walked, and we were comfortable enough to snap a few pictures along the way. The tensions run deep, but we got the sense that they weren’t about to erupt into violence any time soon. Still feeling a little nauseous from our Guinnessessessesses the previous night, we grabbed a bag of Jelly Babies and gobbled them down on our way back to the B & B.