Though our days checkered with lethargy and euphoria have been no means ceased, we were fortunate enough to have a short break from them last week. A friend of a friend named Emma offered to show us around the north of Ireland for a couple of days, and we hastily accepted. (And actually our days here have been a bit better by the way).
Emma was so generous to us the whole time, and even came all the way to our house to pick us up. We left for Belfast, which is about two hours north of our house. It was evident immediately that Emma was a great person to show us around. Not only is she a really cool person that's great to talk to in general, but she knows everything. She was very unbiased in her explanations, and could talk at length about any subject we had questions on or were curious about, and imparted information to us about a number of things that we wouldn't even have thought to ask about in the first place.
For example: the mountains in Ireland. She had indicated a mountain that to Liesl and I registered only as an average hill in California. She explained that all of the mountains in Ireland are small and flat because during the last ice age the country was under a mile of ice. It shaved the tops off of the mountains and there are only a couple of pointed mountains in the country, which incidentally were covered in fog when we were in viewing distance of them.
I was very curious about the "border" between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (the latter is where we are living). I put border in quotation marks because of the thing I was curious about, which is that there is no border really. Emma told us about how it used to be patrolled and how cars passing through were searched, but that eventually stopped. Now you can cross from one country to another without even noticing. I was trying to pay attention but I didn't even notice the border. The biggest thing to notice is that street markings change slightly, and signs regarding money use the pound sign rather than that of the euro. Also there are sometimes signs that say "drive on the left." This is odd in that it's unnecessary, since you drive on the left in both countries. The story behind this is that at the time when the roads were to be built, Ireland didn't have the money for it, so for whatever reason Germany decided to build the roads for them. In Germany people drive on the right side of the road, so when they built roads on which people needed to drive on the opposite side, it seemed natural to them to give everyone some warning. I guess they didn't realize that driving on the left is normal for everyone on this island. Or maybe it was just clarification for foreigners. At any rate, it's funny to see these signs. It's also so weird to cross an open border, particularly after living in a country that has very strict borders and after having so much trouble passing the English border, getting detained and all.
We crossed the border many times during our three day trip, and at one point I found myself in a convenience store at a petrol station, about to pay for something with pounds. I took out my money and hesitated for a moment. Was this the right currency? What country were we actually in right now? I began to ask the guy at the counter, "Wait, are we in the North or the South--?" and broke off, frowning with confusion. The problem is that "the north" isn't all Northern Ireland, because the north west is part of the Republic. Not only was it kind of embarrassing not to know what country I was in, but it was also incredibly strange. (It turned out I was in the Republic at this point, though there were many other times when was unsure of what country I was in as well).
When we arrived in Belfast we had lunch at the Crown, which is one of the oldest pubs in Ireland, dating sometime in the 1800s. Unfortunately for me (and Liesl somewhat), Ireland barely has any conception of veganism, or even vegetarianism really, so I've been eating a lot of chips (french fries) at restaurants. (Most of the grocery stores we've been to don't have any tofu or even know what it is for that matter).
Emma had booked a Black Cab Tour for us, and we met the driver outside of a hotel. He had a very strong Belfast accent, which was pretty difficult to understand. He talked so quickly too. The tour showed us of some highly interesting parts of the city. He explained that the city was segregated into Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods, separated by a wall called "The Peace Wall." You could cross from one side of the wall to the other during the day, but at night the gates were sealed. Though the two waring parties go by the names of two religions, the conflict, the cab driver said, was not so much religious as political. "You might be an atheist," he said, "but you're either a Protestant Atheist or a Catholic Atheist."
Now I don't know how informed you all are on this subject I'm about to illuminate, but I'll explain it from my perspective. Living in the United States, I am often completely uniformed of the goings on in other countries, and honestly in my own country too. Part of this is due to my not becoming self-informed, part is because I didn't learn much about modern politics at school, and part is because the US tends to filter out all news that doesn't concern our country or provide an opportunity for us to make money. The point is that I've learned a lot more not only about the politics in the countries we've been in, but about US politics as well.
This particular issue is more one of sociopolitical nature. Perhaps you have heard about the conflict in Northern Ireland between the Protestants and the Catholics. What I knew of it was that it was something of a religious quarrel that sometimes became violent and resulted in car bombings and the like. Not to downplay the terribleness of that, but bomb threats are not uncommon in California, so I never thought that this dispute was anything out of the ordinary. I would guess that the US has more religious fanatics than any other country actually. Basically, to me Ireland's religious discrepancies always sounded like an underlying conflict in a society that no doubt had other things to focus on. I was drastically uninformed.
I'll recount a brief history of the political conflict. Forgive me for any inaccuracies or omissions, I'm doing my best at remembering what Emma told us, but I haven't retained all of the information. So here's the story: At some point not so very long ago, England, which was Protestant, began to infiltrate Ireland, which was Catholic, by encouraging many of it's citizens to move to Ireland. Those people then married and reproduced with Irish people, and so the two cultures became integrated on this small island. Then England tried to take over Ireland, and after some fighting eventually the countries came to an agreement that the UK could have part of the north. Hence Northern Ireland--comprised of six counties in the north east--became a separate country, owned by the UK, and the Republic of Ireland--the larger of the two countries--remained independent. The Protestants were loyal to the Crown, and the Catholics' allegiance was with the Republic of Ireland. So the Catholics who still lived in Northern Ireland wanted the country to be independent of the UK, and the Protestants wanted the opposite. Religion really barely enters into the picture at all. The number of people that actually attend church has dropped quite a bit in recent years, Emma said. So, as our host John told us when he was first showing us the property we live on, religion is really just an excuse for the dissent: the conflict is political.
The conflict--which they call "the troubles"-- isn't so much a tiff as a civil war. The city of Belfast is literally segregated into Catholic and Protestant sections, divided by a "Peace Wall," which is similar to the Berlin wall. In our cab tour we drove through Belfast into the Protestant neighbor called the Shankill. The area was comprised of rather rundown two-story houses. Many of the last houses at the end of each street had colorful political murals on them. They depicted people that were killed by the Catholics, historical scenes and legends. Though murals have been being painted on these buildings for many years, they paint over them pretty frequently, so these are all fairly new. The war between the groups is something like a war between gangs, or the mafia. People who live in segregated neighbors are all very aware of what happens, like who kills who when violence does occur. But people keep their mouths shut. Most of the intense violence has subsided now, but people were routinely killed in the past. Here are a few of them that we saw:
Do you know the U2 song Sunday, Bloody Sunday? That song is about the troubles.
This is a photo collage of the motto of the Protestants: "Nothing about us without us is for us."
The point of the gun in this one follows you while you walk past it. It's like the Mona Lisa!
This is a painting of a well-known legend. Two boats were approaching Ireland, filled with vikings who were racing to claim the land. One guy from the boat that was losing the race was determined to win, so as they were nearing the land, he cut off his hand and threw it onto the shore, so that he would win the race even though the other ship got there first.
Many of the murals, such as this one, said things like, "murdered by the Catholics," though usually they used the name of a particular group of Catholics.
We got to go right up to the Peace Wall. The Protestant side was decorated with multicolored, mostly illegible graffiti. People had written things on it, messages of peace, encouragement, and exasperation. Here are some that stuck out to me:
Our guide handed us a blue marker and said that we could write something if we'd like to. We were both unsure of what to say, but eventually we ended up writing these things respectively:
We went to the Catholic side of the wall too. The buildings there were made of red bricks. We stopped across the street from a line of political murals, each depicting a different political figure or political scene of some sort. Many of these have to do with foreign or international politics:
One of the saddest things about the troubles to me is that there is really no end in sight. If a Protestant and a Catholic are married, whatever neighborhood they live in dictates their political status. The schools here are segregated too. There's no separation of church and state, so schools are either Catholic or Protestant for the most part. The education isn't really religious, and the biggest differences in teaching between Protestant and Catholic schools is that the history lessons are slightly slanted to their side of their political sway, and Catholic schools teach Gaelic (which they call Irish actually) and focus on Irish culture, while Protestant schools do not. However, students wear uniforms here, and those uniforms are different colored depending on which school a kid attends. So a child's political allegiance is determined for them, and school uniforms are the grounds for cultural discrimination even at an early age. There are a few schools that aren't segregated though, so there is some hope.
Emma told us that people in Northern Ireland think that they can tell whether someone is Protestant or Catholic just by looking at them--and often they can. She said that there are many different subtle ways to distinguish one person from another, names for one. People with blonde hair and blue eyes are are assumed to be Protestant and those with brown hair and darker colored eyes are thought to be Catholic. People named William or Susan would probably be Protestant, since those are British names, someone named Seamus or Maud is most likely Catholic, because those are Irish names. Apparently accents are different between the two cultures as well, which is insane because these people are often practically living in each others' backyards, save for the wall. Some of the suppositions of culture become rather silly though, like the belief that Catholics' eyes are closer together because of inbreeding.
It becomes second nature for people to try and figure out the allegiance of the other person. When you go into a supermarket, Emma said, you can tell whether the owner is Protestant or Catholic depending on what periodical they have. I may have gotten these newspapers wrong, but I believe that if they have The Irish Independent, they're Catholic, and if they have The Irish Times they're Protestant.
The troubles are such a part of daily life for everyone in Northern Ireland that they've become the norm. For Liesl and I this whole situation was foreign and absolutely bizarre. We have no equivalent of this in San Diego. While there are places that have troubles of their own regarding ethnicity or religion or some other issue, we don't have an entire country that has one all-consuming conflict that's part of everyday life for everyone, that's blended into the very pattern of life.
This was just part of the first day of our trip, but we learned so much about these two countries that I'm going to leave this post where it's at and write one or two more posts in the next few of days to recap our other exploits.
Until then,
Stephanie
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