Highlights from Belfast!

Hey everybody - Dave here -

Loving Belfast!

Highlights -

The Titanic Walking Tour. In it's heyday Belfast docks and the Harland and Wolff shipyards were the biggest in the world. There are two still standing giant cranes that welcome you to the city and have been classified as licensed buildings - so nothing can be done to them without government permission. The Titanic (as well as her two sister ships - the Olympic and the Britannic) were built in Belfast & as the Irish say - "The Titanic: She was okay when she left here!"


Pubs... love it. Saturday I spent 6+ hours at Kelly's Cellers sitting in with some local musicians on a jam session. I played some harmonica and later played some tunes on guitar - Van Morrison was born in Belfast, so I did a couple Van Morrison tunes that they all knew - and remembered all the words to a couple irish tunes I've played so did those as well. So much fun.


West Belfast murals: Really interesting to go through West Belfast and hear about the Troubles. They've built a "peace wall" which is a massive steel wall that runs between Shankhill Road and Falls Road the two hardcore Protestant/Catholic streets & last week there was a poll taken and 60% of the people said they still want to keep it up and wouldn't feel safe if it was taken down. That being said, Belfast is now the second safest city in the world following Tokyo, so they've come quite a ways from 15 years ago.


Northern Ireland coast: Giant's Causeway is incredible and is the only World Heritage site in Ireland. If you haven't heard about it you should check it out.




Tomorrow I head to Dublin! Hope all is well with all of you!

Cheers!

wza out.