belfastI just returned, exhausted, from Northern Ireland a few hours ago. The weekend was such a blend of beauty and despair that I am still trying to sort things out.
It was my last school field trip, and in some ways I am happy. It was nice to travel and not have to plan anything, but to travel with 30 other American students is overwhelming. I agree with writer David Sedaris that groups of Americans sound like trumpeting elephants. We don't do a good job of being low-profile.
Crossing the border into Northern Ireland was very uneventful. It is an open border, so it was similar to going into a new state, just with a different currency. First we went into Hillsborough, which is a historical town in Northern Ireland. I wasn’t too interested in it, but we did see a nice church and a very old fort. We spent the first night in Derry or Londonderry, depending on one’s political/religious persuasion. Catholics/Nationalists call it Derry, while Protestants/Loyalists call it Londonderry. The city is famous for its walls, which were basically a fortress to protect the Protestants. The city has a very violent past, and is adorned by wall murals on the sides of Catholic homes, depicting historical events. The murals themselves are very eerie. They have images from rioting, Nationalist leaders, and of home raids by Protestants. I took lots of pictures of wall murals this weekend. Most notably, Derry is the site of Bloody Sunday (hence the U2 song), which occurred just down the road from our hotel. The memorial for the day that a group of young Catholics were killed was very simple but heartbreaking. Most of the victims (I believe there were 14) were my age or younger. It is also amazing to think that the event happened in the last thirty years. It seems like it should have happened centuries ago.
After Derry, we took a pleasant break and went to the Giant’s Causeway. This site is definitely a wonder of the world. It is rock formations on the coast that look like stair steps. One would have to look at pictures to do it justice. We went on a beautiful, clear day, so we were lucky. After we went to the causeway, we traveled to Carrick-a-Rede, which is a rope bridge connecting two different cliffs. I was very proud of myself for crossing, because it was high up, and I don’t like the heights thing, especially crossing over an ocean. The views around the bridge were worth it though. We could even see Scotland from where we were.
The beauty of the Causeway was short lived, because our next stop was Belfast. The sections we were in of Belfast can only be described as uneasy. On Saturday, we went on a 7-hour walking tour of the city (hence, my exhaustion). While I knew the Belfast was a divided city, I had no idea how divided it really was. We went through both Catholic and Protestant areas numerous times, and walked alongside the “peace walls” which separate the neighborhoods. These walls are huge, so no one can throw anything over the walls and are covered by barbed wire. All the neighborhoods have murals everywhere. The murals are extremely beautiful, but their messages are so ugly. There were murals stating that the only way to peace is to rid the world of Catholics and vice versa. I cannot fathom how much hatred would brew inside of you to see read these messages daily. Other murals were of activists, the IRA, or of flags, etc. The neighborhoods were so run down, that the contrast between the vibrant, untouched murals was astounding. Apparently, the murals are sacred ground, so they are never touched by graffiti.
To give an example of how divided the city is, we caught taxis from a Catholic area of town into a Protestant area of town. It was only a five minute taxi ride, but two of the taxi drivers got lost, because they never venture into the Protestant section of town.
I felt very uncomfortable walking through the areas, even though my professors are from Belfast. It was clear that we weren’t welcome. Cars would cut as close to the curb as possible just to scare our group, and a group of boys even started throwing firecrackers at us. My friend Felix, who is Korean, would get yelled at because people thought he was Chinese, and they are very racist towards the Chinese there. After all the walking, I was so thankful to come back to the hotel. The thought that kept running through my head the entire day, as cliché as it was, was from the U2 song “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” that no one’s right and everybody’s wrong. It is just beyond my comprehension the amount of hatred that has transpired in the name of religion throughout the ages. It makes me never want to identify with a religious sect, except for Unitarians, maybe.
I learned so much from the experience, and I’m glad that we went when we did because riots had occurred in Belfast a few weeks ago, so we couldn’t have walked around.
Email me if you want to see my pictures of the murals.
