belfast

Date traveled: November 2, 2017

Belfast was a blink. Unintentionally I took a lot of pictures of coffee-related signs & images. We were nearing the end of a too-fast Ireland road trip, expecting some kind of border wall crossing into the north/the UK with all we heard about north-south tensions. We didn’t even see a sign.

The character was noticeably different than when we drove around the Republic of Ireland. One of the things I liked about Belfast was its acknowledgement of its working class roots & reconstruction. Who knows how much of my own ideas of the place played into that, but it felt like the city had a gruff, no-nonsense manner.

I felt the city had an honesty that was refreshing when travelling to tourist hotspots. More than once we heard a greeting that seemed generic in the context but that I don’t think I’ve heard in other places – instead of saying hello, a couple people wished us ‘good workdays’. No idea if that has anything to do with the city’s economic history, but it might.

I don’t think Belfast is a place associated with art, but in it I found a visceral energy conducive to creativity. It could have something to do with the surprising regularity of murals & graffiti art or that the downtown area didn’t seem like a tourist-only enclave. People we interacted with seemed friendly without being put on. The energy felt genuine, which I think is fueling. It was big enough to have things going on without being overwhelming – smaller than Ottawa, bigger than Halifax.

It seems disingenuous to say too much about a city you were in for a day, sick & nearly hallucinatory from the lack of sleep. Maybe pictures translate the experience to something more concrete than it was originally. It’s funny what sticks – like the several layers of patchwork on a lot of the roads, & how much our conception of the place was reared by a guesswork discussion about what that means.

Another thing I remember is wandering into a narrow alley lined with bars with a corridor on one of its sides, empty aside from being filled with murals. Often it’s the places I don’t intend on going that strike me the most, like I’m uncovering a secret that people with maps & best-of lists won’t reach. It’s all part of the traveler-as-explorer allure that my imagination plays into, if only unconsciously as the time, imprinting the split second when I turn to first view something that a corridor with an umbrella ceiling, thinking ‘this is a picture, it has to be’.

It wasn’t a place I fantasized about living – something I do often – but I found it inspiring. I certainly wouldn’t be against spending more time there in the future & getting to know it better, as unlikely as I know that is to ever occur.