November 4, 2010
Yes I'm behind, blah blah blah...
Days 26 & 27 (Saturday, October 16, 2010 & Sunday, October 17, 2010):
Belfast! Sometime earlier in the week, Kristin and I arranged for us to go to Belfast for the weekend. We were supposed to leave on Friday, but some class situations came up so we ended up leaving early in the morning on Saturday (well, that was the plan anyway).
We booked the tickets via Ryanair - which is this airplane that is able to keep costs down because they do some ridiculous stuff (like making you go through 500 advertisements once you book your flight until you can actually confirm it) - I hear they want to actually reduce costs more by having people stand up during the flight and charging for restroom usage.
Anyway, since Ryanair doesn't fly out of Cardiff, we had to go to Bristol to catch our flight! That meant that we had to catch a train to Bristol from Cardiff, a bus from Bristol Temple Meads Station to the Bristol Airport, and then a plane from Bristol to Belfast!
Well, things in life never go as planned. We were rushing from the very beginning as we scrambled to get on a taxi from Talybont, where we live. It turned out that Kristin had gone out the night before and had fallen asleep unintentionally (and hadn't woken up until like 15 minutes before we had to leave). So anyway, we got on the taxi to the train station. It turned out that neither of us had remembered to put down our confirmation numbers for our train from Cardiff to Bristol, so we lost even more time as we went through Kristin's Blackberry to find them. Seriously, I don't know what people did before Smartphones. Or...maybe it's that Smartphones have made people less responsible. Anyway, back to the main subject...
So we managed to get our stuff printed like 2 minutes before our train. We hopped on the train, only to be surprised about 50 minutes into the ride that we had actually GOTTEN ON THE WRONG TRAIN!
Thankfully, it turned out that we did not go in the opposite direction of Bristol but actually had gone 50 minutes in a different direction...so we just needed to catch a train from the next stop to Bristol.
Boy, we were so nervous on our trains!! Well, we attempted to catch a cab from the train station we transferred from (I can't remember the name of the city to save my life), but they were asking for 100 pounds!
By the time we got off at Bristol Temple Meads, we only had about an hour to go. The thing about Ryanair is that it closes its gates 30 minutes before the actual flight, which meant that we only had 30 minutes to make it!
Did we make it...?
Nope. Not within the 30 minutes, that is! We asked the cab driver to drive as fast as he could, but there were cars blocking the road...and we got there around noon, when the gates were supposed to be closing. We ran into the airport and into the check-in guy, only to find out that THANKFULLY our plane was DELAYED for 2 hours! Apparently, there was an air-controller strike which was causing delays everywhere across the UK. Usually delays are horrible and I hate them, but this was awesome! We had been praying the entire time on the train, so we were like, GOD IS GOOD ALL THE TIME! :) Hallelujah for delayed planes!
Because of the delayed plane, we were able to take a breather in the airport. We grabbed some food and coffee:
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It was kind of annoying that we were going to arrive at Belfast so late in the afternoon (3pm), but we were just so thankful not to have missed the plane and wasted like, £90.
The flight was quite uneventful except for the fact that there was this cutest little baby boy sitting diagonally from me. I was making faces at it the whole time and playing with him! He was so cute. I really love babies!
We opted to head straight to the hostel we had booked from the airport so we could drop our stuff off. We stayed at the Lagan Backpackers Hostel, which had awesome reviews about the wonderful qualities of its owner. The place definitely lived up to its reputation - the owner was very nice and gave us a map with all the interesting sites to visit. Breakfast was included with our stay - we paid for a 6-bedroom girls only room but ended up at a 4-bedroom mixed gender room. It was fine though! Here's a picture of our room:
We took the rest of the afternoon/night exploring the city:
 Main building of Queen's Uni in Belfast |
 The City Hall! |
It was really, really annoying because there were kids loitering ALL around city hall, and the police were doing NOTHING about it! It was ridiculous. Kristin and I were talking about how in America, teens would not be allowed to just loiter everywhere...
We ended up eating dinner at this Spanish Tapas Place:
It was really yummy! We then wandered around the city some more and ended up going to this very famous Crown Bar:
The Crown Bar supposedly hasn't changed since it was founded in 1849. It was really hectic in there because the place is so small. The interior was gorgeous, but it was way too crowded to take pictures...
This is a really bad shot of the place, but you can see the glassy theme that was going on throughout the bar.
We actually didn't end up doing much because we were both absolutely exhausted from the stress of the day, so we decided to stay in and sleep for the next day.
On Sunday morning, we got up to an English Breakfast, which was pretty decent. The hostel let us leave our stuff up in a corner to pick up before we left to the airport, which was very nice so we didn't have to luggage everything around the whole day.
We encountered this very cute marching band as we were hitting up the city:
Apparently, it was some Veterans' Appreciation Parade or something. There were people of all ages - some of the more elderly men had a bunch of military badges on them.
Unfortunately, we couldn't go into the City Hall because it was a Sunday :( We actually couldn't find much to do in the city because it was a Sunday. We also found out that Belfast is such a tiny city...
This fish is one of the bigger attractions. I look so tiny, haha...
The individual tiles had these more detailed pictures and inscriptions which were valuable to the city.
We ended up going to the Belfast Castle which was REALLY disappointing. It was TINY!! There was absolutely nothing there. We were especially disappointed because there was this entire climax leading up to the castle. We had to climb this national park sort of thing, which falsely gave us an impression that the castle was going to be magnificently hidden behind nature. Boy, were we wrong...
 The trail on our way up! |
Look how tiny the castle is!!
It was a pretty view from the above though:
I honestly can't remember what else we did this day. We ended up taking a cab to the Belfast airport with this super eccentric Irish cabman who gave us a rapid tour of the city as he drove. It was really nice for him to explain some of the background history of the famous sites even though I really could not understand half of the things he was saying because of his accent...
One of the more interesting things about Belfast is that this was where TITANIC was built! Unfortunately, we didn't get around to seeing the Titanic museum...I really should have researched Belfast more before going there. Well, it was a good experience nevertheless. It was nice to getaway and taught me valuable lessons about planning and such.
Our way back was really not dramatic at all compared to our way there. Both of us were pretty much ready to crash by the time we got back to Cardiff.
I'll end it here for today. Updates again soon hopefully...
