Day 10: Belfast journeys

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We added a camera to the electronic graveyard today... sigh. Em went for a walk this morning while I slept in and her bag got DRENCHED... so we’re up to a water-damaged iPod (Em), a smashed Blackberry (me) and now camera. We are silly.

Anyway, thankfully the rest of our day was much better!! We went to the St. George Market first things first – it was a nice indoor market. We wandered around the small crafts tables and I tried a bunch of food all over the place (curries, salami, pork thing, this weird pink and yellow cheese). Their cupcakes looked AMAZING but we didn’t get any... and Em finally got to pet a sheep! Momentous occasion.

The rest of the day was really just spent wandering around the city – it was a good way to do it. We went up to the clocktower for some pictures and found the great big ugly blue fish. I love their ugly fish 😊.

From there we wandered towards the Titanic stuff... but really... it’s just because we were looking for somewhere to pee for free. We were successful by finding the Odyssey building which also had a random Canadian Sports Bar...!! What is up with the Canadian stuff here? It’s surprising yet neat.

On the way back towards the city centre we passed by the beginnings of a pro-life rally... we found it a little unsettling how many children were there. We did some shopping around the core, and by shopping we looked at things and just kept saying “oh we’ll buy it in London” haha.

Em had to run into the pharmacy, so I sat down on a bench and ate my sandwhich. Some lady came and sat beside me and... that’s when the fun began all over again! She started talking to me about the pro-life rally and the pro-choice one (which was like, a block away up the street in front of City Hall). Her friend was one of the pro-life rally organizers and so she’s telling me all this crap about people getting in fights and riots and yada yada yada. Then she told me all nonchalant that the pro-life was going to come march up to the pro-choice group.... so like... HELLO POTENTIAL CONFRONTATION.

At this point I was definitely excited for Em to come back out of the pharmacy so we could at least move out of the rally parade route haha. The lady then went on to explain that apparently murders are becoming more prevalent here... but like people just disappear. I’m sitting there like really, you’re going to tell an obvious tourist this crap? It’s not like I’m scared now or anything, but you generally don’t tell tourist the crap about your own city.

While still waiting I figured I might as well get some info out of her – so we talked about what the current policies in Northern Ireland are right now, so I guess it’s currently illegal to get an abortion so people are doing it under the table or leaving to do it elsewhere which has its own problems.

Em then showed up, so I very quickly suggested we should head on over out of the parade route lol. We went behind the gates of City Hall to watch from behind the pro-choice crowd – we figured if it got nasty we could just walk out the back gate of the estate. It didn’t get too nasty, thankfully though – only a couple shoves and only one person got arrested that we saw. The pro-life kept marching, it’s not like they just stood opposite of the pro-choice which is good.

I have to say I was stunned at how many people were part of the pro-life... like it was easily 5x the size of the pro-choice group. They just kept coming and coming and coming. It was also interesting to see how many kids were there... I don’t know, I just find that weird but I guess that’s just because of what we’re used to back at home.

(Fun moment: the pro-life group was blasting the song “It’s my Life” – Bon Jovi, and the pro-choice group kept chanting: “Pro-life is a lie – you don’t care if people die!” in reference to women getting sick I suppose? We weren’t exactly clear on that one lol.)

After that, we finished walking around the City Hall; it was a cool area – they had a giant screen set up on the front lawn and there were lawn chairs everywhere to watch Wimbledon.

Next up – we puttered around the mall. For some reason we keep gravitating towards them, yet buy nothing haha. Oh well, fun to people watch and just browse. We slowly winded back to the hostel and found a movie theatre on the way, so tonight we headed out to watch Spiderman. I actually quite enjoyed it – much more than I thought I would.

And tomorrow it’s off to hunt for the murals! Huzzah.

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