Today, we took every form of transit imaginable.

We said “no” to another Ulster Fry this morning, opting instead for cereal, tea and toast to start the day. After lounging around in our room watching BBC, we packed up our things and walked to the bus station to start the first part of our journey home. Because our Belfast plans didn’t come together until late in the trip, and we had booked a series of return tickets rather than one-way trips, we took a very nonsensical, backtracking route, bussing from Belfast to Dublin, catching a plane from Dublin to Glasgow’s small airport, and taking a train from the small airport into Glasgow’s city centre. We stayed the night in Glasgow, in the same no-frills hostel we slept in on our first night in the UK. We got settled and went right back out into the shopping district, but by the time we got to it all the stores had closed. Just when we were feeling a little loose with our dough, we had nowhere to spend it. All was not lost, however—we found a chic little bar tucked away behind some of the high-end stores in Merchant City, and (lucky us!) they were having a 2-for-1 deal on pizzas. While the pies were pretty run-of-the-mill, the atmosphere was great and it was nice to have a sit-down, civilized meal on a trendy patio for about the same as we would have paid to hunch over a fast-food grease-fest on swivel-chairs and a melamine table. We were even able to pack up the pizza we couldn’t eat, and take it with us. We went to bed pretty early, mostly out of boredom, looking forward to the following day’s flight to Ottawa.

And here we are, two busses and one plane later, trying to survive the week until our internet gets hooked up at home. For now, we’ll be hitting up Bridgehead once a day to check our email and have a coffee, thereby satisfying two of our worst vices in one sitting. We hope you enjoyed following us on our journey and we can’t wait to see all of you soon. By the way, Tim Hortons has hopped over the Atlantic and is now clogging arteries and rotting guts over here with their sludgy, burnt "coffee" and mass-baked lard-blobs. Sorry, Dad :)

xoxo

Brian and Karen

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.

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.

Today, we went where the locals told us to go.

Sunday, as planned, we went to Dun Laoghaire for a taste of the Irish coast—the East one, to be precise. We disembarked the train by the town’s waterfront, and set off on a long walk along the coastline. Dun Laoghaire is pretty—there were lots of boats and ships in the water, and plenty of spots for sitting or dipping your feet. The buildings around the water were strangely Mediterranean-looking, some even reminiscent of the ones we saw in Malibu or other posh parts along the California coast last summer. A few minutes from where the train stops, we came upon a traveling fair that was in the process of setting up. Seems innocent enough, right? A good place to take the kids? Well, sure it was—if you’re morally OK with Pam Anderson, wrapped (loosely, I might add) in the American flag, airbrushed in a sultry pose on the side of the ticket booth. The creepiness continued with a bumper-car-style ride with the most random American celebrities airbrushed around the canopy of it—Tina Turner, Nikki Taylor (memba her?), and a handful of semi-recognizable has-beens.

We kept walking, not really knowing where we were going, but confident that if we stuck to the water’s edge we’d end up in the towns described to us by Brian’s colleagues. We passed a tower that housed James Joyce for a while, and “the bathing place” where he, and countless other men over the years, took to swimming nude in the Irish Sea. It was only about 15 degrees and intermittently cloudy when we went by, but there were enough old men strutting around in Speedos around there to play “there’s your boyfriend” for eternity.

We continued on through Dalkey and Killiney (where Bono lives, apparently—but we didn’t see him), a walk that turned out to be entirely uphill and, after a while, not terribly interesting. We found a small café at the top of the hill, and we were starving. We had to settle for a pastry to tide us over, and after a small rest while we snacked, we headed back down the hill into Dalkey, where we planned to catch the train up to Howth since we still had a whole afternoon. After chatting with a man on the platform, we decided to go instead to Malahide, on the advice that we’d probably find it more interesting. People, it seems, do not want us to see Howth. Fair enough.

We rolled into Malahide around four o’clock, and found a quaint little town with a marina and a nice, well-trod park by the water. Still running on pastry-fuel alone, we were wasting away. We managed to summon the energy to haul our skeletal, gaunt bodies to a take-away fish and chip place recommended to us by a shop owner in the town. We handed over 5 pounds each and, in return, received a greasy paper bag filled with a piece of smoked, deep-fried cod suitable for doing bicep curls with, and a packet of deliciously soggy, thick-cut French fries doused with vinegar and salt. We took our fatty finds down to the park, planted ourselves in the grass, and dined-a-deux in the afternoon sun.

Five pounds heavier, we waddled back to the train and made our way back to the campus for our final night in Dublin.

Yesterday, We Got Home!

But we're not about to sit down for a whole blog-forsaken hour (or more, for blog's sakes) blogging you up to date. We'll get around to it, though, just hold your bloggin' horses. We have a LOT to tell you about: our two days in Belfast, and the two-day odyssey that brought us back to Ottawa, among other things.

For now, just know that we're home safe and sound, and we couldn't be happier (well, maybe if we were at our REAL home in Nova Scotia, and all of you Ottawa-ites were there too, having a backyard barbecue with my Ma's spinach salad and Brian's Ma's potato salad, my Dad and David manning the grill... *drool*). Whew, that got out of hand really quickly! The point is, check back soon if you want to know how our dynamic duo fares in their journey to Northern Ireland and back to the nation's capital!

Yesterday, We Made Up for Friday's Shortcomings

Our Friday night was supposed to be really good. We had plans to meet up with a few students in the city centre, for dinner and drinks. We all convened at the mammoth spire jutting up from one of the main streets in town, and Brian and I made arrangements with the group that we'd catch up with them at one of the small Chinese restaurants down the street after we returned a few items to the grocery store, which we weren't going to have time to eat before leaving Dublin (we're cheap, remember?). A nice plan, but after ducking into every freakin' Chinese restaurant looking for our group (unnerving for other diners, we're sure), we couldn't find them.


We ended up walking around looking for a pub to have a pity-pint in, but somehow we ended up at home, in bed, drinking Guinness from tiny breakfast cups and eating Hunky Dorys. So, in addition to being cheap, we're also quite cool. In any case, it wasn't the end of the world, and Brian was up at a reasonable hour the next morning to prepare for the Clinton Institute's symposium (CI pictured below) where all of the summer school folks get a chance to share their papers with the rest.


Now, UCD is a very windy campus. It's not the kind of place you want to go out walking in a flowy skirt if you prefer to keep your lady parts to yourself. It's also not the ideal place to stretch out and read a book by the fountain if you prefer to decide when to turn the pages as opposed to having them turned for you. If you try to do both in a single afternoon, you find yourself in the situation I was in yesterday. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I stuck it out for an hour and a half before finally giving in and coming back to the room.

The evening was great, though. The summer school people kindly welcomed me at their BBQ after the symposium, so I got a chance to clear up any misconceptions about Brian having a hermit wife. They fed us a delicious meal of hot dogs (way more sausage-like than the crap we get in Canada), chicken, the tastiest sweet corn off of the grill, salads, and herbed new potatoes, followed by a plateful of fresh strawberries, real whipped cream and meringue nests. The booze was flowing, as were the conversations, and despite the chill in the air as night settled in, everyone was having a good time. Thanks to the gift of storytelling these Irish students have, we had a few hearty (and hurty) belly-laughs--the most reliable marker of a good night. The party moved inside the Clinton Institute when it got too cold and damp in the garden, and we stayed until close to midnight before joining the slow trickle of people back to the residences.

It's Sunday morning now, and we're preparing for a day-trip to Dun Laoghaire (pronounced "dun leary") and a few of the conjoining towns, instead of the jaunt up to Howth as we'd planned. The locals thought we'd have a better time in the other towns, so we're taking their advice. We'll let you know how it pans out later tonight!

Yesterday, We Succumbed to the City

That's right, folks. We let our hair down, opened our wallets (a crack), and said, "Take us, Dublin".

It kinda started Wednesday night. Brian's summer school was hosting a "traditional Irish Music and Pub night" in the city, and after finding out I'd have to pay 20 Euro just to come along, I opted out. We are going to be one cheap old couple, that's for sure. Pity our kids and grandkids--they can anticipate many Christmases and birthdays in the future where they receive an inexplicable, obvious re-gift, like a stained doily or a Women's Weekly magazine from 1984. Anyway, the pub night. I felt very ashamed once Brian left for it--why didn't we just pay the money? I had talked about going and seeing a movie by myself while Brian was out, and although I felt pretty crappy about being such a tightwad, I forced myself to go. I'm glad I did. I saw Mamma Mia--my first time going to a movie alone, and in a new city at that--and it put me in a chipper mood. I don't even like musicals, but this was canceled out by a) Abba, b) the Greek island setting and c) Meryl Streep (rolling around, jumping, doing the splits, and other things normally reserved for people half her age--amazing).

Just after boarding the bus home, a body moved from the back and slid into the seat beside me, and it was Brian! Purely by coincidence, we'd gotten on the same bus. We shared stories about our evening apart, and it turns out I didn't miss much at the pub night. What the 20 Euro charge was for is still a mystery. It didn't buy food, drinks, or cover into the venues. It may have paid for the "traditional music" played by two guys, one of whom clearly had a Manchester accent and was therefore far from "traditionally Irish".

Thursday morning, like all of the mornings before it, was spent on campus. UCD, if you're curious, looks like any North American University--sprawling, with lots of buildings straight out of an engineering student's sketchbook... if they were drawn while drinking Absinthe... and without any regard for the people who would have to navigate their way through and around them. It does have a really nice fountain though, in front of the library.


Brian skipped Thursday evening's speaker (the evening sessions are not mandatory), so after having lunch here at the residences, we got on the bus into the city centre, with the intention of seeing a film (The Visitor--might be on DVD in Canada) at the Irish Film Institute. When we got off the bus downtown, though, the streets were abuzz with shoppers, tourists and the odd local, and we were sucked in.

We found a few cool shops we'd never seen before, grabbed a cup of coffee to walk around with, and sat for a while on the steps of the tourist information centre, drinking our Americanos and hashing out a few ideas Brian had been mulling over for the next day's seminar. In the course of our walk, we actually parted with a few Euro, buying a decoration for our new apartment, a box of notecards that were designed precisely with me in mind (if you're reading this, you'll probably get one at some point, and you'll know what I'm talking about), and a glamorous, oversized ring to rival the one on my left hand (at a fraction of the price, and without the meaning). Check it out:

After a while, we started feeling peckish and found our way to one of the restaurants that had been recommended to me by the receptionist at the salon where I got my new head-suit. Her idea of cheap, it turns out, is not in line with mine. The entrees were each around 14 Euro, and none of them were tempting enough to make us want to spend that much. We politely left the restaurant before ordering anything, and hoofed it to another place the salon girl had mentioned, and which we had passed earlier that day and approved of the prices. We each got a savoury pie for 9 Euro, Brian's filled with Guinness-braised Beef Shin (I know, shins!?) and Mushrooms, and mine with Lamb Moussaka, Roasted Aubergine and Minted Potatoes. They were to die for, but they were pretty small for our North American-grown gullets. Besides, we'd spied a Häagen Dazs
on our way to dinner and our internal compasses were pointed that way ever since. We treated ourselves to a sundae at one of their courtyard tables, and people-watched while we indulged.


Today will be pretty uneventful, but we'll have something to share with you by Saturday night.