Our time in Scotland is done, and I write this from our B&B in Londonderry/Derry (depends on who you ask). It's been an interesting couple of days!
On Wednesday we wandered Glasgow with Heather, our friend who now resides there (another Australian). We did a spot of shopping and got nice proper hiking shoes, saw the city centre, and Tom experienced seaweed beer! The next day we headed up to the Highlands, Inverness in particular. There we did a lovely walk around Loch Einlan (with its own little ruin on an island) and saw the Highlands Wildlife Park, which had an awesome little safari feature. We saw a polar bear! Having him in an enclosure near some deer seemed mean; the deer and he were just staring each other down. We got back on Friday and went to see The Dark Crystal, which was both awesome and a hoot. I think everyone forgot how often the Chamberlain makes his weird 'hrrrrrrmnn!' sound.
Saturday was an incredibly lazy day, which wasn't originally planned but was in fact awesome. We did do a bit of Glasgow sightseeing, wandering around to the Kelvingrove Museum and seeing some of the university architecture. Heather made us incredibly awesome pork and apple sausages! Turns out UK sausages are far superior to Australian ones. We were going to head out to Glasgow comedy club The Stand, but tickets were sold out :( Instead we went drinking and dominated the jukebox!
Sunday we made a day trip to Edinburgh and went to see the Zoo. This turned out to be a fantastic decision due to the huge number of awesome penguins. We also got cute monkeys, lots of kickass predators, and many more. We went to Edinburgh Castle afterwards, but it wasn't taking any more people that day. So instead I got a new Scotland pin for my satchel and we had a delightful early dinner before tripping back to Glasgow and going to see The Presidents of the United States of America (band, obviously). They w;ere actually pretty fucking awesome and fun, and played their entire first album.
Monday we sadly left bid Heather and Glasgow farewell and traveled down to Cairnryan for the ferry over to Belfast. This was done at the most breakneck pace we could manage due to the need to check on before 11am and our big delay getting to an internet cafe to print out the confirmation. We had accepted we were probably going to fail, and turned up at 11.10am, only to be told this was fine! I haven't been that relieved in a long time. We chilled out on the ferry for a few hours - which was pleasantly calm, after being warned we'd probably get seasick - and then popped off to Belfast.
Belfast and much of what we've seen of Northern Ireland can probably be best described as "grim". There are some lovely buildings such as the Town Hall (with a great exhibit on Belfast's history) and the Victoria Square shopping centre, but much of the back streets and buildings are very much damaged and vandalised. While everyone was quite friendly, the town itself just doesn't look very welcoming.
After poking around there for a few hours and seeing a movie we drove up to Coleraine for dinner. Turns out at 9pm not much is open in Coleraine! We had one of those genuine small-town experiences were strangers walk into a bar and every head in the place turns to look. Everyone was friendly though and we discovered garlic fries - FUCKING EXCELLENT - at a local 'Chinese' restaurant. We stayed the night in the van up near the Giant's Causeway and went to see that early this morning. It was great fun and makes you feel like a kid, clambering over all the rocks. Once that was done we came to Derry and did some of the tourist things - walked around the still-standing city walls (left over from the 1600s), saw a museum about the history of Bloody Sunday and civil conflict in Derry, saw a few lovely churches, and then came out to the B&B with our very chatty hosts.
So there's a lot of activity summarised very, very quickly!
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