Magic Jewball

all signs point to no

 

In the seaside town

Filed under : Travel
On April 1, 2012
At 11:00 pm
Comments : 5

Tonight’s the last night of my spring break (sob!) and so it’s as good a time as any to share some pictures from the trip. I had a little slip and fall at the Giant’s Causeway and hurt my knees, ankle, and hand. Everything’s healed except my hand which is still bandaged in such a way to make it hard to type. Thus, the delay in posting. I was patched up by a nice guy from the National Trust who kept trying to make me look at the cliffs while he was cleaning the wound. More on him later.

Here’s the teaser: I liked Northern Ireland much better than I liked the Republic of Ireland. More on that later, too.

The Giant’s Causeway is apparently the #1 tourist destination in Northern Ireland. It’s a kind of basalt landscape that looks like thin columns and tessellated disks. But I really just loved the coastline. That’s why I go to the British Isles, for this particular landscape. I adore it.







Besides the landscape, the other big tourist attraction in NI, especially this year, is Titanic, which was built in Belfast. It’s a huge thing there. Everywhere. I could never figure out whether people actually cared or if it was all for the hordes of tourists who are expected when the big exhibit opens (coincidentally, today). But I did get treated to things like this throughout the country.




I had the song that the lyric in the title comes from in my head a lot of the time I was in Portrush. It’s about the classic British seaside holiday spot which has seen better days. And Portrush has. But I found it charming, especially on Saturday when all the families came. And just like TripAdvisor said, my B&B lady was the sweetest, most welcoming person you could want. And really, everybody was. Everyone talked to me. I had a conversation everywhere I went. It was kind of amazing. I talked to lots and lots of people. But not about everything. That’ll be later, too.


Answer to the last post’s teaser: the cake is called Fifteen because it includes 15 of several ingredients. It’s a traditional traybake (bar cookie) in Northern Ireland.

(These houses face the sea but they’re mostly empty… I wanted to buy one and eat fish and chips the rest of my life).


More to come…



Morrissey – Everyday Is Like Sunday