Rail and Sail to Belfast

Trip Date: March 16, 2012

**Photos are at the bottom. There will be many more from this weekend. Just haven't gotten that far yet!

Wow! What a whirlwind weekend! A few weeks ago one of my classmates, Rebecca, told us she was going home to Northern Ireland and any of us who wanted could join her in Belfast while she was there visiting some of her friends before they moved elsewhere. But that's besides the point. The important thing is that after some careful consideration decided it was in my best interest to celebrate St. Paddy's (not Patty's) in Belfast because, really, when would I have the chance to do that again. Certainly not next year when I'm in Australia.

Rebecca left on Thursday for Northern Ireland to visit her family a few hours out of Belfast and that night I went to see Monty Python's Spamalot with some friends at the beautiful King's Theatre in the Glasgow City Center. It's a hilarious musical with awesome music, though I have to admit that many of the jokes were totally lost on me. Nevertheless, I've been wanting to see it for a while and finally got the chance. We grabbed a few drinks after the show, but what I thought was going to be a sort-of late night, ended up being a very very late night and I ended up crawling home at 3am and climbed into bed.

It was important to get up early the next morning because I had to get to the city center to catch a train, which would take me to a bus, which would take me to a car/passenger ferry, which would take me to Belfast. It's a great package deal called the Rail and Sail: for £54 you get a return foot passenger ticket right from Glasgow to Belfast!

Since I didn't get a whole lot of sleep and still had to pack, I was in a fluster when I woke up. I made myself breakfast and packed what I thought I needed and was planning on heading to school quickly to pick up some papers to read on the train and ferry. I hate mornings and can never get going and before I knew it, I was turning the corner to the Partick Train Station with 20 minutes to spare before my train left. The trouble is that my train was leaving from the Central Station in the city center, which was definitely more than 20 minutes away, even if the subway got to Partick right on time. Luckily, there was a whole stand of taxis ready to go, so I climbed in the first one and told him to book it to Central Station. He was in no such hurry, and I kept looking at my phone, watching the minutes count down.

We finally pulled up to Central Station and the station clocks read 11:38 when I walked in (my train was supposed to leave at 11:42). There were too many monitors for me to make sense of anything with such little time left, but I couldn't find a station agent anywhere, so I walked around the waiting area a few times before I found someone and asked from which platform the Rail and Sail train was leaving. The lady frowned and said the direct train already left. My heart sank, but I wasn't giving up. My recollection from getting my tickets was that I needed to catch a bus at some point, so I asked about the 11:42 train. Something clicked in the agent's mind and she realized that my ticket was not the direct ticket and told me I should just be able to catch the train from Platform 10 to Ayr. I thanked her and booked it for the platform, and just as I sat down on the train, I felt it lurch forward. The luck of the Irish was truly on my side that morning.

The journey from Glasgow to the small town of Ayr was not too spectacular, and neither was the bus ride from Ayr to Stranraer. It was raining and since I was still fairly sleep-deprived, I just plugged into my iPod and dozed off. The bus did start following a road right along the ocean once we got to Girvan and if the sun had been out, the views of the Northern Irish Sea would have been amazing! But even in the rain, the town of Girvan looked idyllic, with seaside cottages built right up to the edge of the water! It wasn't much longer until the pulled into the Stena Line ferry docks on Loch Ryan and I easily passed through security (airport style), got a mocha for my caffeine fix, found an outlet to plug my iPod in, and connected to the free wifi so I could download a few of the papers I didn't have time to retrieve that morning.

Soon enough they called everyone onto the boat and let me tell you, it was a ZOO! I'm not sure how many people can fit in the boat, but it was packed to the gills. There were tons of people heading to Belfast; lots of young people heading to Belfast for St. Paddy's Day, including some unforgivingly stereotypical American backpackers, and even a group of young teenage boys wearing pink bunny suits (I'm still lost on that one!). Belfast was going to be an exciting weekend, not only because of St. Paddy's Day, but also because it was the final weekend of the Six Nations Rugby Tournament and Ireland (that's both Northern and the Republic) was playing England in the final match. BIG GAME! But the boat was beautiful and new. There was a typical food-court style room and seating area filling the main deck and on the deck above there were more refined and quieter seating areas with iPads, news casts, a cinema, and a trucker's club. What's more is that the ship also has a fully functional hotel and day spa you can treat yourself to for a few extra quid!

I was fortunate enough to find a big comfy seat in front of a large window and it didn't take long before the massive ship was pulling away from the docks. Sleep deprivation finally caught up to me and I passed out, sleeping most of the way across the water. I did wake up in time, though, to take my camera and head outside to the smoking decks as we were pulling into Belfast harbor. It was still drizzly, but I managed to snap a few (hundred) photos of the harbor, including the famed cranes with the monikers, Samson and Goliath, of the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding company. In the corner of the harbor is a beautiful new building that will house the Titanic Museum, slated to open this year, celebrating the centennial of the ship's inaugural, final, and infamous voyage (which is interestingly enough in the news recently as a new hypothesis was put forward suggesting an unusually strong gravitational pull from the sun and moon caused super high tides three months earlier, allowing for a massive iceberg to float so far south).

The ferry's captain effortlessly steered the boat into it's slip along the harbor and everyone disembarked rather quickly. I phoned Rebecca to let her know I was safely in Belfast and we arranged plans to meet up in the city center, so I caught a city bus from the ferry terminal to City Hall - a very, very easy connection to make (and cheap, too).

Belfast has a reputation for being dangerous, rowdy, and riotous and the fears are not totally unfounded what with the Troubles, severe border control, and the recent St. Patrick's Day riots of 2009. The last decade, though, has seen a sharp decrease in the amount of violence between the Protestant and Catholic Irish factions within the city, though in many places and in certain pubs you'd best not talk about the wrong sports team, political party, or religion, because in Belfast, they are often all one-in-the-same. While my family was in [the Republic of] Ireland this summer, my brother and his fiance were in Belfast, and though I may not remember what they said exactly, I seem to think they were glad they didn't stay too long. As soon as I got off the bus in the city center, I wondered why.

Downtown Belfast is beautiful! Especially at night when everything is lit up. I took a few photos of the City Hall while Rebecca came to find me. We grabbed dinner at a very fancy little restaurant called, Deane's, for some upscale seafood (who knew that fish pie could be so good? oh, and they have a desert or salad and dinner for £14 sometimes) and then got some suggestions on pubs from our server who directed to a place called the Duke of York. Well, we did not find the Duke of York, but instead came across the Bittles Bar. Bittles is incredibly tiny, occupying the corner of a very narrow triangular building, and no more than 10 tables inside with one bartender running the whole show. But there were paintings of historic Irish athletes (George Best, Barry McGuigan) and politicians including one of an embrace between the leaders of the Protestant and Catholic political factions. Rebecca and I chatted away in the corner underneath a painting of the Titanic, but we didn't stay for too long as some very drunk fellows at the next table over were getting to be a little too unpredictable.

With our Guinnesses finished, we walked back across town to the Crown Bar Liquor Saloon, which is where many laborers would stop in for a wee pint after a day's work. It's famous for being opened by an Irish man and his English wife - which is odd to begin with - but the story goes, or so I'm told, that the woman desperately wanted to name the bar the Crown Bar in honor of the British crown. Her husband agreed, surprisingly, and offered to have a crown beautifully displayed....in mosaiced tiles on the floor when you walk in so you step on the crown every time you walk in for a drink. Again, that's the way the story goes and I can't confirm it right now. But the Crown Bar is a masterpiece of tiled mosaics, carved wood, tin ceiling tiles, stained glass, and metal work. The main bar area has no tables, though there are 10 fully-enclosed booths in the bar for private discussions between patrons. Above the bar is a board with 10 circular holes each assigned a letter A-J that corresponded to a specific booth. If you needed something from the bartender, you would just hit a button in your booth and the corresponding light turned on, and you would soon get service without losing privacy. Awesome place and definitely work a peek when you're in Belfast!

The night was getting on and we started heading back to Rebecca's aunt and uncle's flat where we were staying while they were out of town. On the way, though, we stopped in one more pub called Filthy McNasty's where we topped off with another few pints of Guinness before calling it a night. We hailed a cab to take us the rest of the way. Rebecca asked me, on the way back to Glasgow on Sunday, if I noticed that the cabbies wanted to know where you wanted to before you got in because many cab drivers will not drive into certain parts of town as they can just be too volatile. But where we were going was fine and we soon crashed into bed without alarms set so we could just sleep.



(Either I've been itching to write for a while or my memory of last weekend is just still so clear that I have a lot to write about! More coming soon, but I've got to go to bed!)