Belfast: Day 4: Game of Thrones Studio Tour

One of the few things we booked before arriving in Belfast was the GoT studio tour.

We caught PT into the city for breakfast first, then jumped onboard the shuttle bus with one other couple… which seemed weird. Was the place going to be almost empty?

The bus ride was about half an hour.

The weather started out fine. Things took a turn for the worse while we were inside.

At the entry there was no sign of life until we spotted a tiny group of people at the door.

We were inside very quickly and it was set up a lot like the Harry Potter studio tour. If you haven’t done it then that description won’t help you!

Basically the entry was a cafe and the gift shop. You go into an antechamber in groups for a quick talk and some footage from the show before going into the displays. It was quite good to be reminded of the main characters and scenes.

The costumes were displayed within the sets. You could get quite close and see the incredible detail.

These are wildling costumes, the people who live in the snow beyond the wall. They have real shells sewn into their clothes.

The costumes were my main area of interest and I think they were probably the best and biggest part of the tour.

The tour also includes a variety of models of sets.

I’d say the place was less than a quarter full which was great for us, we could look at everything immediately. The signs were quite small and the spotlights meant you had to stand right in front of them to read them. Possibly an incentive to pay for the audio guides?

The cafe serves themed cocktails. Red Wedding? I don’t want to remember it, let alone drink it.

They had pictures of the scenes in which the costumes featured next to each piece, which was great, but as Luke observed, they just aren’t as special when they aren’t part of the whole thing. That being said, having done some costume making, I could appreciate the detail and wished I’d been able to see the under layers and fastenings.

These moths are hand made, I remember noticing them on the show as costume decoration.

The scale of some of the props was massive!

I liked the detail in the armoury and the plaques had the story of each significant weapon within the story.

There were several interactive exhibits, including ones where they take your photo and put you in front of a background from the show then try to sell you a print of it. No thanks!

Of course the final room is the eponymous throne, made of a thousand actual swords that were created then moulded into the seat.

Exit through the gift shop! I bought a tea towel, of course.

We waited inside for the bus and it started absolutely bucketing down. We got quite damp just going the few metres to the bus.

We were going to see the GoT tapestry (done in the style of the bayeux tapestry) but the museum was shut, so we caught the glider back to Ballyhackamore at school rush time. We listened to a small boy mock his friends for vaping and telling them how they would get addicted and they denied it. Obviously they hadn’t looked around them, almost all of Belfast vapes constantly.

Luke falls asleep despite the witty banter.

Off the bus we decided to go to a local Thai restaurant and try an Irish delicacy – the spice bag. Not a very glamorous name for a not very glamorous dish.

We ate in so it wasn’t served in a bag or pizza box, but it’s basically a salad of deep fried food. In this case potato, chicken, capsicum, onion and spring onion all coated in a salt, pepper and chilli spice mix and with a massaman dipping sauce.

Apparently this was invented by Irish Chinese restaurants as a snack food. You can get Indian, Thai… I imagine the concept could be applied to any cuisine.

The food was delicious but incredibly salty.

To the pub!

Danny and Peter joined us and so did their friend, Julie-Anne and her one month old baby, who was super cute.

4Oct2018

Ireland: Dublin

by Miss Penny Black

We only spent a day and a half in Dublin but we did a bunch of stuff!

We stayed at a pub/hostel that was a bit grotty but the location was great.

We visited the National Portrait Gallery.

Luke met an American lady who’d come to Dublin just to see this Caravaggio.

Jess went on a Viking bus/boat tour and a walking tour while Luke and I walked around town and then sat in a pub (just for something different). We did see the statue of Molly Malone.

Guess which bit you rub for luck?

Dublin has some shops with funny names. Also people in Ireland really love knitwear.

We also went to a comedy night – there is so much comedy in Dublin! If we’d known we might’ve booked tickets to something decent. As it was we saw three guys in a basement and they were ok. In the same pub there was a ukulele jam happening. People brought ukuleles and were given music books and all played along together. It was funny to watch.

Hrm… actually, we didn’t actually do all that much as there wasn’t much time. We enjoyed Dublin though and were looking forward to another fun ride on the ferry back. We ended up with the same kitchen crew as the way over and they remembered Jess was a vegetarian, which was pretty impressive. We slept a lot better as the sea was not as rough.

Next: driving through the Cotswolds and staying at Makeney Hall.

3Oct2018

Ireland: Dingle

by Miss Penny Black

Dingle was definitely the highlight of our time in Ireland. It’s a little town on the west coast of Ireland in County Kerry and it’s the capital of traditional music. We had three nights booked at John Benny’s pub in the middle of town and stayed in an apartment out the back.

The first night in town we had a walk around and stopped in a few venues. The first had traditional music, the second had a guy with a guitar who played covers and used a loop machine. The third place was the hotel we were staying at and had a duo comprising of a young woman who sang and a man playing the guitar. They mainly sang covers and their own songs, not Irish songs. I’d expected every place to be doing trad music but the variety we encountered was good.

On the second night Jess booked us tickets for a concert in the local music shop, only a few doors down from where we were staying.

The show was mainly the man who’d played guitar at our hotel the night before (he was very good, he also sang) and a woman who sang and played the accordion. They explained a bit about trad music and the show was great plus it included half-time Irish coffees!

Luke and Jess went to another concert the next night which they said was even better. I stayed by the fire and read my kindle.

We didn’t just listen to music though. We took a drive around the Dingle Peninsula and were lucky to get great weather.

The views were absolutely spectacular. There were also lots of hills that looked like great walking and made me wish we had more time to explore.

We took at look at some ‘famine cottages’. While the layout was basic there was a lot of information displayed about the history of the area and the inhabitants of the cottages and what happened to them as a result of the potato famine.

Of course we also spent time in Dingle shopping and eating. I looked longingly at several pairs of Hunter boots but in the end decided I could order them online rather than lug them around Thailand.

As we left Dingle we stopped off at a very scenic little lough where took a bunch of photos and enjoyed the serenity.

Next: Dublin!

3Oct2018

Ireland: Sligo and Galway

by Miss Penny Black

Luke, Jess and I caught the overnight ferry from Liverpool to Dublin and slept from about 10:30pm until 4:30am. It was a rough crossing, which made it more fun (for me anyhow), feeling the boat crashing up and down, but it also meant less sleep. Luke had a room to himself and somehow managed to sleep through all of it, lucky him!

Getting our stuff out of the boot after driving onto the ferry.

We drove off the ferry at about 5:30am, which meant very little traffic to contend with around Dublin. I felt the most awake so I drove up to Sligo. Here’s a map I have prepared to show our trip around Ireland. Please admire my use of lines and arrows and the star to denote our start and end point. Pretty good, huh?

We stayed in Galway, Dingle and Wexford.

We’d decided on a stop in Sligo as Jess will be performing in an historical musical set in Sligo so she wanted to have a look. Also we had an enormous number of hours to kill before we could check into our accommodation in Galway.

Sligo is a medium sized town and it’s pronounced SLY-go, not Slee-go as I’d first thought and which, if I could make a suggestion to the local people, sounds nicer. Sligo sounds a bit like something you’d find if you hadn’t cleaned your drains for a while.

Anyhow, Sligo the town was actually quite nice. It didn’t feel too touristy and didn’t give us any indication of the startling numbers of American tourists we’d encounter everywhere else. I mean, there were still lots but not impenetrable scrums blocking every doorway.

We signed up for a walking tour (actually Jess did almost all the Ireland booking and organising of everything, partially because she was the one who’d wanted to go there and partially because Luke and I were reaching booking-fatigue after months of travel). The tour started in the Information Office and the guy taking the tour had a pleasingly loud and deep voice and looked rather like the BFG.

A statue of Yeats and our tour group in which I managed to photograph one hand of our very knowledgeable host.

The tour went for about 3 hours, which was on the long side for a walking tour, but I can honestly say that, when it finished, that I had learned a lot about Sligo and it turns out that Sligo has had quite a few interesting things happen in its history.

Sligo’s (and perhaps Ireland’s) favourite son was WB Yeats. Neither Luke, Jess nor myself are particularly into poetry and even though I’d heard of Yeats previously I knew almost nothing about him. Throughout our stay in Ireland his name came up over and over again and nearly everywhere we went there were exhibitions and memorials to his life, everyone and everywhere claiming to have had something significant to do with him. I almost wished I’d read up on him beforehand because he was such a recurring theme.

Sligo has a tiny museum that doesn’t have much in it. Currently there’s an exhibition on a woman who led the suffragettes, which was interesting, but the thing I liked most was a huge brown lump with a placard that said ‘BOG BUTTER’.

Apparently people used to store huge (the size of a decent foot stool) chunks of butter in bogs. Bogs have a highly acidic, cool, oxygen-free environment that perfectly preserves all kinds of things. We’ve all heard of ancient people being exhumed from bogs but butter? It made me wonder whether they had forgotten where they put it or left town without it. The butter that has been found can be hundreds of years old and modern people have been experimenting and found that peat bogs can preserve food just as well as a modern freezer for periods of up to two years! Fascinating, I say.

Because I’ve left my blog updates for over a week I now can’t remember a huge amount of what we did in Sligo (obviously the bog butter stuck in my mind) but I assure you it was a nice town. We spent our afternoon taking a drive up the coast (the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’) looking at the scenery, which was lovely, and then our last stop was the huge Glen Car waterfall. We caught a bit of rain that day but were all equiped with decent raincoats and the sun did come out here and there.

We left late afternoon to head to our Airbnb accommodation just outside Galway near the tiny village of Gort. Another terrible name for place that looked fairly inoffensive.

The next day we headed into Galway, after hiding in our Airbnb all morning watching the gale force winds of Storm Ali. The winds were so strong that they blew an unfortunate woman off the side of a cliff while she was in her caravan.

Galway is a pretty town. Many Irish towns are very pretty and colourful because of a government initiative in the 1050’s called ‘TidyTowns’. We have something similar in Australia but ours is mostly focused on reducing litter. In Ireland it is much more broad and encourages people to keep their towns appealing on every level. Part of the initiative was to encourage people to paint their towns bright colours.

While in Galway we did a number of things and if you go to Galway I recommend you do them too!

Shopping

We had a walk around and Jess bought a tin whistle. Also we noticed how very many book shops there are in Galway – an impressive number!

Music

We spent a few hours in various pubs listening to trad music and also watching buskers deal with drunk people who then came into the pub and got told off by the bar tender.

The Aran Islands and Cliffs of Moher

Early on our last day we drove to Doolin, where the ferries to the Aran Islands leave. There are three main Aran Islands and we chose to go to the furthest, which is also the largest. It took two ferries to get there. The first looked like a normal ferry and the second one looked like a a fishing trawler. The weather wasn’t great, which meant sitting inside the stinky ship rather than out in the breeze.

On Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands we took a bus tour to see the sights. Our bus was small and there were only five of us on it. Our driver was a local who spoke Irish first and learned English at school. He had obviously had issues with people not understanding his astonishingly thick accent because he repeated everything four or more times. Also there wasn’t actually all that much to see. There were lots and lots and lots of stone walls surrounding tiny fields. Any areas that hadn’t been laboriously cleared of rocks were knee-deep in them. It was truly astonishing that anyone continued to live there, it was such a harsh and barren place.

After returning to the mainland we took a quick boat ride along the coast to see the towering cliffs of Moher. I had not realised they were the ‘cliffs of insanity’ from The Princess Bride. What with the rain and spray we didn’t end up with much of a view or any decent photos, I think I’d prefer to do the walk along the top on a sunny day.

Bunratty Castle

On our last night we attended medieval banquet and performance at Bunratty Castle. We went to the late sitting at 8:45, making it quite a long day but the show was great and the food was plentiful. Lovely singing and music with humorous interludes in a genuinely ancient castle.

Next: Dingle!

3Jun2018

Belfast Bits and Pieces

by Miss Penny Black

Belfast is certainly a different city to the place I visited in 2003. Admittedly the amazing weather and longer time I’ve had to see it have played apart, but it can’t be denied that there is a much more cosmopolitan vibe to the place now.

On our last day of driving around we kept things low key and stuck to Belfast, seeing Danny’s new house and a few tourist attractions, starting with a ‘Melbourne breakfast’. Obviously it was avocado with fancy bits on sourdough but also a smidge of vegemite too. Very nice!

Ulster Museum was on my to-do list after I’d seen it online and it was a great place to get a feel for Northern Ireland’s history, from prehistoric times to the current day.

They used to have dragons!

On the very top floor of the museum is a display dedicated to Ireland’s current #1 tourism drawcard – you guessed it – Game of Thrones.

An enormous tapestry (currently 84 metres and growing) tells the story in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry. Having seen all but the most recent season, it was interesting walking along and picking out the plot points.

The signs warning people not to touch the cloth were also in keeping with the theme.

The Museum also has a partially-unwrapped mummy. Danny said it gave him nightmares as a child. I can’t think why.

The Belfast Botanical Gardens are worth a visit if you like that sort of thing, and if you’re there on a cold day I’d definitely recommend a stroll through the heated Ravine building, which contained tropical plants from around the world.

There’s also a Victorian glasshouse with some very interesting specimens.

We took a stroll around the gardens of the big building (um… parliament? Danny, help!) in the very first photo and also drove up to Belfast Castle. It was built in the Scottish Baronial Style in 1862 by the Marquis of Donegal.

A little bit Hogwarts?

It is always nice to see historical buildings being in regular use and this castle is now a function hall and restaurant. The gardens contain sculptures, topiaries and mosaics of cats. We walked around and found a few after having a drink and a sit in the sun.

A post about the sights of Belfast would be incomplete without some photos of the murals that can still be found in various places around the city. Since my knowledge of NI history is far from complete I won’t comment on the political situation except to say that many of the more violent murals we saw years ago have been replaced but there are still a few giant paintings of men in balaclavas with machine guns in hand.

In the city centre there is plenty of (what I think of as) Melbourne-style street art. Beautiful and quirky images that go well with the new bars and restaurants.

The last bar we had a drink in was The Sunflower. Years ago people had been shot in this bar, hence the gate at the door. Now it’s a gay friendly meeting place with ukulele jam nights.