Our weekend trip this week was to Northern Ireland, so Friday morning, we got on a bus headed north. Our first stop was the Titanic Belfast Museum, which is built on the site of the old Harland & Wolff shipyard where the Titanic was built. The museum was very interactive, and the highlights for me were reading the telegraph messages to and from the Titanic and the surrounding ships who rescued some of her passengers, and the collection of personal artifacts. I picked up a poster at the gift shop which was an ad for the White Star Line with a picture of the Titanic on it. After lunch, we went on a political black cab tour of Belfast, where our drivers explained the history of the Troubles in vivid detail while driving past some of the city’s famous murals and memorials. The peace wall, which still divides some Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, was impressive, it’s covered in signatures and messages from visitors around the world. That night, seven of us found a nice pub for dinner, which was actually very good.
Saturday, we set out along the Causeway Coast, starting with the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge. The hike out to the rope bridge was really pretty, and the misty rain added to the atmosphere. I took some great photos on this hike, one of which is below. After the hike, before getting back on the bus, I bought a sausage roll from a nearby stand, and it was stunningly good. It might be the best sausage roll I’ve ever had, it was much better than the ones in Scotland or Eastbourne. For our next stop, we traveled to Giant’s Causeway, which was nearly as impressive in person as in photos. Anthony, Gideon, Abbott and I also hiked halfway up the cliff face to the “Giant’s Organ,” a series of tall, pipe-like basalt columns up the cliffside that look like organ stacks. Once we had gone that far we figured ‘in for a penny’, so we hiked the rest of the way up the cliff and walked back to the bus on the other side. We then headed to a sheep farm where we held some baby sheep and saw sheepdogs in action before we finished the day in Derry.
Sunday began with a walking tour, where our guide took us along the city walls before we walked downhill into Waterside to see the Free Derry museum. The photo below is of St Coulomb’s Cathedral just inside the city walls. The Free Derry museum was both moving and impressive, and given I barely known anything about Bloody Sunday beforehand, I learned a lot from it. We then headed back in Dublin.
At Carraighill this week, I continued my work on Eastern European banking, making a lot of progress and finding a few places where the model could potentially be improved.