17 juillet 2009
Bye Bye Belfast, Au Revoir Irlande
This will be my last post in this blog. Tomorrow, I'm leaving Belfast and Ireland for good. Direction : Greece and Athens ! :-)
Here are my last pictures of Belfast, not very cheerful ones : last week was the Twelfth of July, and it's the bonfire season, when Loyalists remind everybody the day of the Battle of the Boyne, by burning huge stack of woods and crap, and as you can see they add insult to injury by burning the Republic of Ireland flag on it (sometimes, even the picture of the pope). Of course, sometimes, it depends the year, the situation is quite tense between the communities : bomb alerts, riots, etc. On the second picture, you can see the police, near where I work, closing the Albert Bridge due to a bomb scare in the central station. Due to this, we finished 1h30 earlier this day !
I will keep writing a blog, a new one, and this time i will experiment a new provider, probably Blogger.
27 juin 2009
The Twelfth is Coming
It looks like a wild wasteland, but this is not littering. This is the preparation for the Twelfth of July.
18 mai 2009
A night at the "Opera"
Last Saturday, I was invited at the Grand Opera House of Belfast to watch a play. This is one of the fanciest place of Belfast, created in 1895
and refurbished totally some years ago. As the bizarre architecture of
the place says it, it is not a place devoted to only one kind of art,
but it is more a place where opera, magic, circus, theatre and musicals
collides to create something monstruous and opened to everyone... It
has even been used as a cinema during 20 years. Of the play I watched
at this occasion ("The Happy Medium") I won't say any word : a cheap comedy, set in Belfast, with cheap jokes, and such a strong accent that I couldn't understand most of the jokes with where not... physical. But according the roaring irish audience, it was really funny ! :)
19 avril 2009
A visit to the zoo
Belfast Zoo is only 20 minutes away by bus from the City Centre. Take any bus n°1 from Donegall Square West, and here you are. It is in the shadow of Cave Hill, and has quite a lot of species. Unfortunately, i ran out of time and could not see for exemple the anteater or the tigers :(
Agrandir le plan
09 novembre 2008
THE KREMLIN
The Kremlin is not only the siege of the Russian government in Moscow, it's also the name of one of the most famous nightclub of Belfast.
The reason why it is named after the Kremlin remains a mystery, all the more since it is a gay nightclub ! A place where i would never have thought to go without my connextions with the Belfast Gay Maffia (hello Arnaud!).T he decoration inside evokes socialist realism, and we can find pictures of Stalin, socialists workers, busts of Lenin, etc...
It is worth visiting, and in the end it is quite like any other nightclub, but it will remain my best party so far in Belfast !
08 juillet 2008
Saint George's Market
It is said to be one of the oldest and greatest attraction of Belfast and one of the best market in all United Kingdom. As seen from the building of my job :
It was built between 1890 and 1896. To be frank, it doesn't reach the level of the markets I have seen for example in Budapest, but as a remnant of the XIXth century, right in the part of the city colonized by working buildings, it deserves consideration.
And, especially, it provides the members of all these companies (to which I belong) with healthier food on Friday than the traditionnal Subway, sandwich or fish and chips, on which we are to feed on the rest of the week. And the paella is the favorite dish of all :
06 juillet 2008
Dog, Ship, and Seahorses
The Belfast coat of arms was established officially in 1890, when Belfast was granted the status of city by the Queen Victoria, during her official visit. However, the chained dog, and the seahorse were largely spread among merchants long before that.
The seahorse, used twice, symbolise the importance of the maritime business for the city. The chained dog remains a mystery. About the ship, we notice it displays a flag which is a mix between the Scottish and the English flag. It is probably there to remind the stream of Protestants planters from England and Scotland.
The motto "Pro tranto quid retribuamus" comes from the Bible (Psalm 116/12). Translated from the Latin, it means ‘what return shall we make for so much’. And i am still trying to figure out what it means in good French :D
29 juin 2008
Carnival !
Yesterday, to my great surprise, while I was heading to the Royail Mail Enquiry Office to get a letter too big for my letterbox, I happened to meet a lot of people in the streets and children with strange colored outfits. Then, after discovering that the Enquiry Office didnt know where the letter was, I went back to the Townhall, battered down by the incompetency of the Brits postmen, and suddenly all the people came together and celebrate out of the blue a carnival.
I suppose it is the kind of event which was unknown in Belfast for a long long time. As soon as I'll succeed to upload the little film i've taken of the carnival, i'll post it online. For the moment, only these pictures.
26 juin 2008
Live Session at "the Duke of York"
The problem, in Irish pubs, is that it's very difficult to hear musicians playing. All the people around make so much noise that it's barely audible ! So, the contrary of what happens on the continent, where music is just hear to make people deaf !
What i learned the day after : the "Duke of York" in spite of its name is a bar where only one kind of people tend to go, the kind who is Irish and proud to be, and it's better not to go there wearing a Union Jack because my housemate told me a guy was killed there in a fight because he wore Reebok trainers with a tiny Union Jack on it ^^
15 juin 2008
TOUR GUIDE
Yesterday, I went with people of my workteam for a Guided Tour of Belfast, through the districts were bad things happened since 1968 (year when the problems started to arise between Protestants and Catholics, fostered by the British). So we took a black cab and were given a cabdriver who told us, from the beginning that he was Irish, Republican, that this was an Irish territory ! And here we go !
The main attraction of the Tour, of course, were the murals, the wall painted in remembrance of martyrs for example (there are more than 2000 murals in all Northern Ireland!). But since Northern Ireland knows a so called "Peace Process" (it's not yet Peace!) things are going a lot smoother now, and you can see that with the dozens of Tour Guides through the city. It has become a really touristic attraction now. And, about the murals, i won't be able to display them all here, but here are some on the Solidarity Wall : murals dedicated to other conflicts of the same kind all around the world, about Land and Freedom : Palestinians, Irak, Basques...
Also, we saw the Clonard Memorial (<<< picture), about the victims of Bombay street, situated just on the edge of the socalled "Peace Wall", the frontier between Catholics and Protestants districts. But as you can see at the terraces covered with wires and fences (second picture), there is not much trust, and they still need to protect themselves from clubs, balls, stones, bottles thrown above the wall. On this side of the wall, the Irish flag is displayed, and on the other side, you will see only the Union Jack.
There is even a wall in the Belfast Cimeterry which separates Catholics and Protestants tombs ! They don't even trust each other after death ! We visited the memorial to volunteers of IRA killed by British troops. A lot of incidents happened during the funerals too.
So, to put in a nutshell, according our guide, the "Brits" are the biggest war criminals of the second half of the XXth century, Thatcher wanted bodies, John Major was a fool, they didnt respect nor the Human Rights nor the Geneva rules conventions, tortured, applied a politic of "Shoot and Kill" every time they wanted, and presented themselves before the international community as "Peacekeepers" in a situation which they created by themselves.
Maybe I should try to find the Protestant City Tour now :)