Derry town...

After reading my blog the past few weeks you are probably wondering if I actually work or just travel and I have taken many day trips recently. It has been great to see the country and to learn about the culture and troubles from a different view than just Belfast.
On Friday Alison, Lauren and I went to Derry for the day. We had a great day and saw a lot of the city. My good friend Julie studied abroad in Derry last fall and it was crazy to walk around the city and think about her walking there too. The coat of arms for Derry is a Northern Irish flag with a castle and a skeleton. Pretty interesting.

As you come into the city, one of the first things you see is this statue. It is called the Hands Across the Divide, and is meant to represent the two sides of the troubles. It overlooks the Craigavon Bridge that crosses the River Foyle and joins Derry's mainly Catholic Cityside with the mainly Protestant Waterside. Pretty sweet.

I also entered free Derry, in a predominatly catholic neighborhood who naturally are calling for Derry to be free from British rule. The area surrounding this has lots of murals, from hunger strikers to bombings to a peace mural.


Derry is the only remaining completely walled city in Ireland. It was really cool to see the walls, to walk outside of them and then on top of them. There wasn't much inside the actual walls, but at a museum we saw the orignal plan of the city and how everything was within the walls. We also learned that some city in Pennsylvania was modeled after Derry, when William Penn came and took the plans back with him. Alison is from PN, so the museum man was very eager to tell us about it. Funny enough, he kept saying Pennsylvania was formed, rather than a single city. It was pretty funny. I also really liked the cobblestone streets, something Belfast is lacking. From the top of the walls, within one of the cobblestones was this celtic design that I thought was really cool.

This staircase is AMAZING and if I were rich, I would buy it and live there. It was in the Craft Village within the City walls. As I stood in awe, I have always been a huge fan of spiral staircases, Lauren said 'it would suck to move in.' haha.

At tea time, we decided we would check out a cute little cafe we spotted from the top of the wall. Funny enough, Alison suggested that we all walk seperate ways and meet there since it is called meet to eat. It was pretty funny, we waved to eachother and acted like we hadn't just been walking around together all day. Had anyone seen the whole thing they would have laughed and thought we were huge dorks, which, you might, but it was funny.

On a different note, I have decided to postpone my trip to Kenya and Tanzania until another year. Getting visas from Belfast isn't the easiest thing, and the total cost of the trip keeps creeping up and up with little costs. I would rather put the $1,300 towards seeing all Europe and Ireland. I feel like while I am here, I should take advantage of it and see Europe. I know I will get to Africa at some point. But, it is hard, as my heart still longs for that continent.