Belfast Hotels
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Belfast Revisited
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Arrived in Belfast Saturday afternoon, sleep deprived but happy. I'm hanging with my cousin Brian, who's been studying at Queens University all semester. This is my fourth trip to Ireland --
Dublin/Kilkenny/Tipperary/Killarney in 1996
Belfast in 1997
Dublin/Galway/Inismore in 2001
Brian picked me up at Europa Bus Centre and checked me in to a guest dorm at Queens'. The room is nice -- reasonably comfortable bed and quiet, with a sink in the room and a loo down the hall. We had a nice dinner at an Indian Restaurant that claims to be the best in all of Belfast (I still don't know where that leaves it on any more general culinary scale, but it was very good). We adjourned to Fibber Magee's, a tight pub in the city centre with a lively crowd and a live band of aging lotharios, all in black t-shirts, their heads buzzed (Brian couldn't help seeing Aryan-esque undertones; I saw four guys in their fifties tired of seeing gray hair in their bathroom mirrors). Interesting to be in a pub that full of people and be able to breathe freely and see all the way across the room (my last trip to Ireland, smoking in the pubs was mandatory, now it's prohibited). The band was pretty good on folk tunes, pretty funny on American country (Johnny Cash, John Denver) -- sort of a Celtic Jimmy Buffett in close quarters. The room filled so much that we were squished up against a post, enough so that when the people in front of us were dancing, we were dancing too.
Got up this morning and walked the west side of the city through neighborhoods that were barricaded the last time I was here and past murals commemorating the troubles, some of which are just as I saw them last. A great many of them have been painted over or were on walls that have been knocked down by urban renewal projects. Sandy Row is much cleaner than it was in '97, and Falls Road and Shankill Road are cleaner as well. The last time I was here was before the Good Friday Peace Accord, and things were pretty tense -- I called the embassy before deciding to go, and was assured that it was a reasonably safe place to be during the day -- the police drove armored personnel carriers, and went out two or three vehicles at a time. Last night we were at the pub until nearly midnight, and today, we saw a single police vehicle, and several cops on foot patrol in the city centre. They were wearing bullet proof vests, and walking around in groups of three and four, but they wouldn't have been on foot in '97. I think we may have walked ten miles today -- great way to see the city and get caught up.
As we walked to dinner, we recognized a guy who we had stood next to in the pub last night. Then at dinner, we spotted another (the guy who got bounced for dancing too wildly). It's a much looser and much more cosmpolitan city than the place I visited last time -- my overall impression last time was mostly of a dirty industrial city, coal soot still impregnating every vertical surface, with a quiet population of reservedly friendly people living almost under siege. Now it's been cleaned up considerably, and people are laughing all the time -- pubs are open after dark, and the people are much more European in their appearance -- a lot more denim and a lot less wool, and the women outside the clubs in their late teens early twenties almost indistinguishable from the crowd you might see in London or L.A.
Tomorrow we head for Dublin to see how it has fared.
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