Off to Belfast

We had such a long day exploring the interesting city of Dublin I had hoped to hit the soft hostel mattress and fall asleep instantly, however I lay there for hours on end thinking about everything that was completely unimportant at this time of night whilst Nathan softly snored beside me. There were ambulance sirens echoing through the streets too often and too close for comfort, drunk Irish men were shouting out ‘You wanker’ and ‘You twat’ at each other, it sounded like hundreds of people were in the streets below our window. It took me around four hours to eventually be able to sleep, with a pillow over my head and some music playing in the background.

The morning wasn’t any better, someone was holding up the bathroom for just under an hour, I waited to shower before we head off to Belfast but they didn’t come out until we were just lugging our cases out of the room. We didn’t have time for breakfast, we’d planned to use the microwave downstairs & steal some cutlery for our soup and noodles from the shops but the breakfast hall was only open until 10am.
We head off down the street, exhausted, hungry and stinky.

The drive to Belfast was fairly stress free, except the map directions taking us toll free roots so we had two or three detours off the Motorway which were not explained very clearly. Most of the journey was completely guess work, I’d hoped that it was going to be beautiful Irish countryside the whole drive, however we had a muggy grey sky with foggy background. So although we did see some country side it wasn’t presented at it’s best.
We got to Belfast 2 hours later, on time, for once. We were getting better at navigating without a GPS, finally, I couldn’t imagine how long it would take us to get places with just a road map.

On the drive up we re-entered the United Kingdom, as Northern Ireland is part of the UK, the road signs quickly changed from kilometres to miles and as usual speed signs were few and far apart. So we had no idea what the actual speed limit was part of the way!

We’ve decided to slow down on spending all our money on eating out and having amazing food, so we popped down to Tesco Express & spent 13 quid on food to last us for the next 4 meals. Pot noodles, tea & porridge to be made using hot water from out hotel room tap, bread with no spread, some fruit & I couldn’t help but grab a sneaky packet of chocolate bars. Unfortunately the hot water didn’t get hot enough, so my tea was quite cool and our pot noodles were still partly crunchy.

We went for a little walk around, the pub next to our hotel is called Filthy McNasty’s, it’s bright and colorful with graffiti on the way. (See picture above)

We enjoyed the rest of the afternoon in bed relaxing, I’d managed to pull a muscle in the top of both my legs and one of my calves. Brilliant. Just from a day walking around in Dublin. We rested and watched rubbish TV, at least it was more peaceful here.

Our hotel room looks like a little space bubble designed in the 1990’s to what people thought fashion would be in 2010’s, its very odd, there’s no lock on the bathroom door and the light turns on automatically, the shower head changes colors whilst you shower, we have a double bed and a bunk bed above us... There are lights everywhere, behind us above us and on the skirt board around the wall.