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IRELAND:

This past weekend we all took a short trip to Belfast, Ireland. We took a flight there which was so quick it seemed like the moment we were allowed to put our headphones in to listen to music they were telling us to take them out because we were starting our decent into Belfast... kinda funny. When we got there we were all pretty hungry, so we checked into our AWESOME hotel, the Hilton. We were mostly excited because our stay included an all you can eat breakfast buffet and I was EXTRA excited because I had my own room!! So great! We went to grab some lunch at this weekend street market across the way. After looking at so many wonderful food options I decided on the half pound steak burger with bacon, bleu cheese, hot salsa, and rocket for 3.50. So yummy!

Of course the fun didn't stop there.. Steph and I found this guy making some crepes and we decided we HAD to get one, they were huge!! Below is the a picture of one crepe cut in half...

Stuffed with nutella and banana deliciousness

After lunch we took a city tour on a tour bus and saw some cool sites around town. One cool thing we saw was the Peace Wall on the East side of Belfast. Apparently there has been contention for many years now between Catholics and Protestants, but since '95 things have been going pretty well. There are graffitied peace walls all over this part of town, but this was the major one.

A little treat for us all was seeing where the Titanic was built and launched! I had no idea it was built in Ireland let alone Belfast... maybe I'm naive.. I don't know. Pretty cool though! In the photo below was where most of the titanic was constructed. They would fill this area up with water, 100 million gallons or something like that, and they had a pump at that time that could pump it all out of there down to the 1/2 inch in 100 minutes, rather impressive I thought.

Some of decided to have dinner at a pub there called "The Kitchen Bar", one of the most popular in the town. The food was tasty and the portions were healthy and filling. I ordered the steak sausage on a scallions mashed potato. It had an elegant name but I can't remember it now, haha, but it was excellent! Their sausage was different than what I'm used to in the U.S. Theirs was really soft inside with a different taste as well, not all tough and springy like ours some times can be, hah.

The next day we had our major tour up the coastline of Northern Ireland. This was definitely my favorite day of the trip so far!! It was SOO beautiful and there were so many cool places we stopped. We saw a variety of Castles and harbors and beaches and things of the like. It was an epic time.

An entrance to one of the castles we passed by.

The clan

Okay! My favorite part of the day! Beautiful scenery, right?!! Not only that.. if you look closely you can see a tiny bridge connecting the main land to the island...

Yes we did, we crossed the bridge!

The water seriously looked like this... no photoshop whatsoever done on this picture.

After we'd crossed the rope bridge we drove a little further and arrived at the Bushmills. The oldest whiskey distillery in Ireland. I guess it's been around since like 1200 or 1300 and in the early 1600's it got its actual license to distill. Anyway, we just ate lunch there, no tour or anything, but I did learn from reading pamphlet that Irish whiskey basically is better than Scotch because they distill it one more time than Scotch to make it smoother and it doesn't have a smokey flavor. Yeah... I don't drink.... but I guess maybe thats interesting, haha. The guy who owns the Bushmills also owns Smirnoff, Guiness, and something else... must be a rich man! SO! After we ate lunch there, we headed to whats called "Giants Causeway". Pretty cool stuff! I don't really know how it was formed... but take a look below.

There was a really cool mall that we went to the next day that had lots of shops, most of them really expensive, but of course, without a doubt, there was an H&M to satisfy us poor students. I've been in there FAR too many times this trip so far, haha. Plus every time I go in there I want to buy everything! Last time I went in I came out with two pairs of shoes, shorts, and a t-shirt.... no more! I need to save my money for Paris (Two days!!!) Barcelona and especially Italy, so I didn't go in this time, hah.