Belfast; Monday, 10 November, 2008

I checked out of the hotel, caught the bus into town and dropped my luggage off at the tourist information centre (a hang-over from the troubles is that there are no left-luggage facilities at the train or bus stations or at the airports).

I wandered up the road to the open-top bus tour stop and got on the next tour going to have a tour of the city.

The wind had died down a lot from the previous day, and consequently most people were sitting up top in the open, but I managed to get a good seat to take the odd photo or two.

The tour went round the city centre then out to the new “Titanic Quarter”, what was previously the shipyards. The tour passes the very slipway on which the ill-fated Titanic was built before heading out of the city centre and into the leafier suburbs.

The tour bus then stops briefly outside a fine Palace building, built in acres of parkland. Given the importance of this building and some of the recent history of the North of Ireland it is amazing that they allow tour busses this close to the Stormont parliament buildings, but they do. The building which has figured so much in the peace talks, the building in which the Good Friday Agreement was signed, bringing an end to the violence, and now home to the Northern Ireland Assembly.

From Stormont the tour headed back into town, past the city airport and out into the areas which had featured all too often in the new bulletins of the 70’s 80’s and early 90’s. Today the murals of the Shankill and Falls road are tourist attraction, but in the past they marked (and to an extent still today hide) the divided communities of Belfast. The predominantly Loyalist Shankill road with it’s murals to the Queen and the Unionist groups. The predominantly Falls road with it’s murals to Bobby Sands and Irish republican groups. Even today the road that runs between the two is closed off over night, perhaps one day this won’t be necessary, but according to the tour guide it still is today.

By the time the tour arrived back in the city centre there was only a little bit of time left before I had to head back to the airport so I went for a quick ride on the Belfast Wheel, at which point the wind decided to really get up and it wasn’t the most pleasant sensation sitting in a little capsule 60m up being quite violently rocked backwards and forwards by the wind, though the view, when I could focus on them, were stunning.

After getting back onto terra-firma I had a brief wander around the centre of the city. Sadly, after being pretty flattened in the war, and then torn apart by 30 years of violence the city has only recently been rejuvenated as a temple to the main form of worship, the shop. Wandering around the pedestrianised city centre it was difficult to tell (apart for the accents) that you weren’t in any other city in the UK, apart from the odd genuine Irish pub, and a couple of Irish chain stores, I could have been in London, Manchester, Cardiff or Glasgow.

Hopefully, as the regeneration of the city continues it can bring out a unique character, but as I got on the bus out to the airport I realised that it isn’t there yet.