One giant leap for man....one GIANT LEAP FOR THE GOHOS!
Hello - today we had a late -ish start to the day as we wanted to visit the Siege Museum and the Free Derry museum before we left Derry and they didn't open until 10am. So we headed out in search for some breakfast (and we weren't hopeful due to last nights meal expedition). However this search was less painful and we found a place just the other side of the cities wall. Thank goodness!
The Siege Museum in Derry is dedicated to the siege in 1689. This siege lasted 105 days. The siege was preceded by an attempt against the town in 1688 against Jacobite forces. This was foiled when 13 apprentices (The Apprentice Boys, a Protestant Association) shut the city gates. This was an act of rebellion against James Ⅱ. The second attempt began April 18 1689, when James Ⅱ himself appeared at the gates with an Irish army led by Jacobite and French officers. The town was summoned to surrender but refused.
Long story short, the city walls held and did their job, but this length of battle caused massive overcrowding with the walls leading to disease, lack of nutritious food and cases of plague. The money that used to buy people a fat turkey, was now only buying them a rat. Eek!
There is some very interesting information available and plenty of items including shell casings etc on show, from various battles around Derry. There are even bits of cannonballs (cannons used to line the city walls of Derry).
We headed from the Siege museum back to the hotel to pick up our stuff, check out, grab the car and head to the Museum of Free Derry. The Museum of Free Derry is located in the Bogside area of Derry. The museum presents the history of Derry during the pivotal period of 1968-1972, known as "Free Derry." During this era, there was the civil rights movement, the Battle of the Bogside, Internment, Bloody Sunday and Operation Motorman.
The main message from the museum was how the working-class community, long oppressed, rose up to demand justice and equality.
From here we made our way into Belfast, driving in it didn't seem like the city had much charm. However , we have yet to do our walking city tour which is tomorrow. So we'll report back on our final thoughts. This hotel didn't include car parking unfortunately but there was an open air carpark across the street which charges from 0600-1800 and free after that. So at the time of this blog we have paid until 0915 tomorrow morning. Any money that is extra from today automatically goes onto tomorrow morning, winning! (Note to self: must remember to feed the meter).
We then hightailed ourselves across the bridge (25min walk) to get to the Titanic Belfast which is an AMAZING exhibition on how the Titanic was built (here in Belfast) and its maiden voyage and its demise and the stories of the passengers on board. There was also a section in the exhibit about the discovery of the Titanic wreck, and how this was done. We both thought this was exceptionally well done since it's still the world's worst maritime disaster ever even all these years later. There was a "Ship building ride" in the exhibit. They put you into a suspended cart and take you through a small winding tour of aspects of the shipbuild. It's almost presented like a one of the ship builders telling you their past of the job. Within the exhibit there is also a section of the gantry used in shipbuilding yards. This section was just to indicate the sheer size of the equipment used to build ships of this magnitude. The builders would just scurry up the side of the gantry using a ladder with no safety harness. Needles to say there were at least 250 work related injuries and 8 deaths during the construction of Titanic.
We went into the exhibition at 1715 and didn't get out of the exhibition until 1900.
There is a massive amount of construction happening around the Belfast shipyards currently. There are probably 6 or 7 towers of apartments being built and it looks as though there is a major revival underway.
Deja vu - we were on the hunt for some dinner again, however the city was buzzing with lots of people around and we saw many restaurants on our travels (wow, and they were still serving food). We opted for a hip, happening dumpling restaurant that served lovely food and even better cocktails. Can recommend The Dumpling Library if anyone happens to be in Belfast and even more convenient for us it was just around the corner from our hotel.
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