belfast

cast of characters necessary to understand this post:
me (duh)
other claire (duh)
nick (a teacher at the program i worked at in oxford last summer; one of my best friends from the program)
jen (his wife, who i met briefly last summer when she came to visit nick)

facts to know:
nick and jen live in belfast.
claire and i have come to visit them for the weekend to start our ireland travels.
they are doing an AWESOME job being our hosts and showing us around and answering all my questions about ireland/northern ireland, the history of sectarian tension here, etc.
they are just awesome in general - good friends to have - and it's easy to be around them.  i love that.

and...begin scene!

before arriving in belfast this morning, nick emailed me this:
if you hear of any rioting in Belfast try not to worry its just a few idiots. And i live nowhere near that (deliberately!!)

i was like, um, i definitely haven't been watching the news...the BBC gave me this article (no mom, you aren't allowed to worry).  and now we're here.  and you guys, i am FASCINATED by belfast.  the four of us took a bus tour of the city today, which nick and jen were kind enough to (a) want to do, and (b) genuinely enjoy.  i learned some history and have come to sort of understand what has caused people to riot this week.  and then we drove on the bus tour through the loyalist neighborhood with their british flags everywhere and huge murals marking the deaths at the hands of nationalists...and then we drove through these huge metal gates with barbed wire on top (open today - "a good sign," said the tour guide - the police close them if the tension gets too high) and then a mile long tall fence between the two neighborhoods - literally, i have never seen anything like it - and we were in the nationalist neighborhood with anti-loyalist murals and a empty lot with a pile ten feet high of old tires to burn when they riot and probably (i'm not kidding) 40 policemen lining the route of a planned march later in the day. (info about the march here, and you should click on the link if only because the still image to start the video is of the huge gates that divide the tense parts of the city from one another.)  it never felt dangerous at all, but you wouldn't catch us in these neighborhoods at night...

i don't know if i'm describing this well, but it was incredible to see a city so divided...while life goes on like normal for young people like nick and jen who live in the suburbs.

i'm tired now and going to bed...but i have a lot more to share about belfast and our time here, so stay tuned for more tomorrow!