Yesterday took me to Northern Ireland to meet up with a client of mine and because they were in Derry and a little further away from Dublin Airport than Belfast, I got the double bonus of seeing two Northern Irish cities in one day.
First up was a quick coffee and turnover before racing off to a one-hour tour of Derry, mostly to explore its history over the last several hundred years or so and how it pertains to the walled city. It was on this tour I learned of the significance of outdoor murals in Northern Ireland, which is something I may not have twigged onto for just being there for a day.
While that was cool, the weather wasn't. I kid you not, but every half hour, we cycled through all four seasons: warm sun, brisk winds and overcast skies, snow and hail, and then rain. I was really happy for the free tour coffee at the end, and even more so when the waitress came by and asked us if we wanted a top-up. Yes, please! Although, it was kind of amusing when I asked for cream and she got a big silver cylinder out and began spraying whipped cream into my coffee. It did give it a bit of a fuller taste, so maybe there's something to explore there for next time.
Derry and Belfast are pretty close together, just about an hour-and-a-half's bus ride apart, but it gave me a chance to see the Northern Irish countryside for a bit. Is it as green as everyone says it is? Well, I suppose, but I've seen that driving outside of Toronto and I can't say that Ireland looks any greener or emerald-er than the GTA farms do. But what I did notice a lot of was sheep. There were sooo many of them and I hated that I was on the bus and couldn't go up to them and make sounds at them. Seriously, if you ever have the chance to do this, walk up to a group of sheep and make a loud, guttural sound. They don't "baah" like they do on TV; instead, they make this weird sound like they're possessed by aliens and if you make it back to them, it'll set them off like a chain reaction. I love sheep :)
Where Derry was small and pretty easily traversible on foot, Belfast, I could see, would take far more time to explore thoroughly. I was staying less than a 10-minute walk away from the bus station in South Belfast and that contained a whole bunch of goodies that would have taken several days of hard walking to check out. I went a little northeast of my place to Gonegall Quay where Bigfish was — that was almost a half hour's walk. What I really wanted to see but didn't have time for was the political murals on Falls and Shankill Roads.
Now I'm sitting at Dublin Airport, wondering what the latest possible time is before I have to start walking to my gate. Update: three to four minutes, I'm told. The flight board says to start getting to my gate but it's still 45 minutes before my plane is due to take off and I know there'll be a long line of people anyway.
And speaking of planes, when did Air Canada Rouge start demanding that you print off your boarding pass as though they're a Canadian version of RyanAir? They want you to pay premium prices for economy services, delete negative comments and complaints, change the rules halfway into your trip, and then tell you they're presenting a new "leisure" way of traveling. At least with RyanAir, they make no bones about the subpar product they're presenting but with Rouge, there's this veneer of dishonesty.
So a huge thank you to the attendant at the Air France-KLM desk downstairs who printed my boarding pass for free (and for having a lovely South African accent that made me want to keep talking to you for a lot longer).
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