Wanderung 30

We slid up the Lagan River into Belfast just before dawn. The river surface was smooth and dark, and beautifully reflected the night lights of the inner harbor as we pulled up to the dock and berthed.

Monika was coming down with the cold she had caught in Bergen, so we decided that we would take the shuttle bus into town and then just walk about a bit until Monika became tired and was ready to go. The shuttle dropped us off at the Tourist Information center across the street from the quite grand City Hall building, which occupies most of a city block! The TI center had a free map of the city, which was very useful, and free Wifi, which was even more useful. Monika could finally send off the emails with our daily journal so that they were safely stored on a gmail server rather than just being on her IPad. AND, we could access the Komoot server to download a local street map of Belfast onto her iPad that could be used with its internal GPS to guide our walking during the day. Score!

We kept our walking pace slow as Monika was weak, but actually that let us enjoy the eclectic mix of architecture in downtown Belfast more than we would have if we had hustled along. Our first goal was St George's Market, which had a fancy outside and a cavernous interior that was used for general markets, but it turned out to be open only on the weekends! How disappointing! I made a mental note to return there on some weekend and check out the arts and crafts offerings if at all possible.

We continued over to the Lagan River where I suddenly saw the oddest thing: a small motorboat was towing two people in a large, plastic bubble-like cylinder around a calm spot in the river. Think of a huge cylinder of giant-sized bubble wrap surrounding two adults being towed around and you get the basic idea, but it was very unexpected, even if not quite as bizarre as "two live goats on a rhinoceros statue in Denmark". I have to admit, riding in that "bubble-sled" looked like fun, but I did not see any advertisement for "Bubble Sled Lagan River Rides", and I'm still not quite sure what was going on.

We walked downstream along a promenade on one bank of the Lagan and took some very nice pictures of buildings and their reflections. Across the River at the end of the bridge was a huge statue of a woman on a globe holding a Hula Hoop, which no doubt had some very deep artistic meaning, and an old barge or river tug of some kind that had been converted into a Maritime Museum and restaurant, I think.

We curled back into the Central Business District by way of the Victoria shopping center, which had a pretty little Victorian gazebo outside and a strange sculpture inside that apparently housed a central elevator but looked more like a space ship! Curiously, although the shopping center had an overarching roof, the corridors to the multi-level set of shops were open at the ends so that the wind blew through the complex relatively unhindered. Curious.

When I saw an official "Apple" electronics store, I impulsively stopped in to ask about my apparently dead iPad. The salesman suggested I push both power buttons simultaneously for at least 30 seconds to reset it, and see what happened. When I tried that trick later I first got a graphic picture of a really dead battery with only one halfway-full cell, outlined completely in a vivid red; I interpreted that cryptic icon to mean I had a really dead battery. When I kept my iPad on its charger for almost a complete day, I finally got it to recharge its battery, successfully reboot, and work perfectly again. Yay!

Monika really wanted to see St Anne's Cathedral in Belfast, so we trudged up Donegal Street and took a look inside after paying the entrance fee of 5 pounds each. It was very beautiful but rather modern cathedral, especially compared to the churches we had just seen in Denmark, and with some parts of it were no older than the 1970s. But the ceiling above the baptismal fountain was especially nice.

Some of the stained glass windows were also first-rate. The panes showing people were almost photographic in the portrayal of the facial features, which is difficult, delicate work involving painting features on the pane with a kind of ceramic paint mixture and then firing the glass hot enough to bake on the ceramic but not melt the glass!

But by then Monika was all done in, so we slowly returned to the Tourist Information center and caught the next shuttle back to the ship. There we grabbed a couple of pieces of pizza for lunch. But even with resting, Monika did not have the energy to eat in the formal dining room that night, so we had some spaghetti and salad for dinner and retired to our cabin as our ship made its way back out of Belfast harbor to the Irish Sea.