Day 9 - Belfast, Ireland 05/25/09 (Happy Memorial Day!)

Well, it wasn’t hard to get up today! We’re in Ireland!! We aren’t taking any of Holland America’s tours since they are expensive and we have a GPS unit. They shuttled us to the city center where we had a great day just wandering around and seeing what there is to see. (And thoroughly enjoying the accents.)
Right near where they dropped us off was Belfast’s City Hall, which seems to be a very popular meeting spot. On the grounds was an area for open-air concerts, as well as a continental fair! They have a Ferris wheel just like London, and there were all sorts of food and goods vendors from all over the place.
(Below: In front of the City Hall. Do we look like we belong here? We think so.)

We took a bit of a walk away from the city center, but didn’t go too far. There seemed to be some very pretty churches and buildings around, but if you go too far away from the city center it starts to get a bit…spooky. Of course there are tons of graffiti left over from “the troubles”, but it was strange to us that there also seemed to just be a lot of old buildings that were either housing new things, or were just abandoned, that still had very tall brick walls around them with nasty looking barbed wire all over.

And of course, we stopped for a pint of Guinness before heading back to the ship.