Next on the list was Northern Ireland. I got myself to Belfast and checked it out. Belfast is neat because it was the center of all of the conflict Ireland had in the 70’s – 90’s. I took a black cab tour where someone who lived through the troubles drives you around the city and shows you famous murals and explains what they lived through. I didn’t realize that Belfast still had a wall dividing Protestants and Catholics, with gates that close every night.
Game of Thrones is also filmed in Northern Ireland, apparently the actors were all in Belfast, but obviously I didn’t see any. I booked a day tour to go and see a bunch of the film locations though. If you don’t watch game of thrones this won’t make sense to you, but I got to see the wall (only briefly though, HBO has the wall on lockdown), Renly’s camp, Kingsmoot from the iron islands, the cave that Davos took Melissandra to when she had the shadow baby thing, the beach that Davos uses to smuggle things into kings landing, the stairs that Arya crawls out of the water from when she got stabbed, and the trees that were used for Kings Road. We also stopped at Giants Causeway, which was amazing. Everyone always talks about Giants Causeway and the cliffs of moher. While the cliffs were too foggy to see, Giants Causeway was just fine.
when the time came to leave Belfast, I headed to Derry for a couple days. It’s a walled city so I walked along the walls which was neat. I walked into a pub only to find it was occupied by about 10 old Irish guys who all turned and started staring at me, that was a bit weird.
Next up I’m going back to Dublin for a night before heading to Cardiff for a couple days to meet some friends of mine.
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