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| Belfast! |
My first experience there was for my orientation. I took a flight from Newark, New Jersey to the Belfast International airport. This was far from a highlight of my semester. I got sick on the plane, so I started out my Northern Ireland experience changing into fresh clothes in the airport, feeling tired, confused about where to go and honestly kind of miserable. . The Belfast International Airport is some distance outside the city of Belfast, so I had to take a cab to the hotel where I’d be meeting a staff member of my program for orientation. I had never gotten a cab before and was a bit nervous about that. Of course, that wasn’t hard at all since there was an area where cabs were waiting for people departing the airport. I remember sitting in the backseat and looking out the window at the beautiful green landscape. I was really there, in Northern Ireland—and I would be staying there for a whole semester.
When I got to my hotel in Belfast, they told me that
I wouldn’t be able to check in. I was, at that point, alone and exhausted (It
was 9-something in the morning, maybe, and I wouldn’t be meeting with someone from my
study abroad program until around lunchtime), and that was just about the last
thing I wanted to hear. Thankfully, I was able to clear up the misunderstanding
and settle into my hotel room.
Because I took an overnight flight and hadn’t slept
at all, I was way too tired to take full advantage of my orientation in Belfast,
which was only me and my staff worker from IFSA-Butler. I was their only
student that semester going to the University of Ulster. This meant the
orientation was fairly low-key. My staff worker took me to a shopping area of
Belfast. I bought a pay-to-go phone in one of the shopping centers and some
towels from Primark, a department store that was in every major city I went to
and that I came to love. We also went into a market with a lot of artsy
products and different foods. I got tea while I was there—first of many teas I
would drink in Northern Ireland; this is notable for me because I was not at
all a tea drinker before I went abroad.
We also went to the Titanic Museum. This is a major
tourist attraction in Belfast, which is the city where the Titantic was made. The
parts of the museum I found most interesting were the replicas of the rooms
passengers on the Titanic stayed in, depending by class. They also had
costumes from the Titanic movie on
display. Even though I’m not such a huge fan of the movie, it was still pretty
cool to see the actual costumes Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet wore.
This first time in Belfast was probably when the
fashion differences between the United States and Northern Ireland hit me the
most. This was most noticeable when it came to guys. Guys at the University of
Ulster-Coleraine do dress differently than guys at Susquehanna, but guys in
Belfast dress much more differently. They looked very European—much more
attentive to fashion, more styled and less casual than American guys. The
outfits of the younger guys, especially, reminded me of the boy band One
Direction.The staff person from IFSA-Butler was going to show me more of Belfast, but I was incredibly tired by dinnertime. We grabbed pizza, headed back to the hotel, and left the next day for Coleraine. It would’ve been pretty disappointing if my only time in Belfast had been in a post-travel whirlwind (I didn’t even get around to taking any pictures), but I thankfully had other opportunities to go to Belfast. Look forward to those in future posts!
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