Our third day in Belfast dawned bright and sunny. Again. Funny thing about the weather here; it has been gorgeously sunny and 26ish and all the locals here have been cheering the steady stream of great weather. Funnily enough we feel the same about the weather for opposite reasons – as you may recall it’s been steadily in the mid 30s in Braga for awhile now, so being in classic Seattle summer weather has been a shot of nostalgia and comfort that has been delightful. This is apparently going to change in a day or three, but that is then and this is now. Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we could be soggy! But enough about the heavens, what went on here on Earth today? Stuff and things! Read on!

We started the day off with a return to Jeffers – that’s the spot that our food tour brought us to yesterday, and we liked those soda bread and bacon sandwiches so much we had to go again. Well. Turns out that a super salty sandwich is a fun treat the first time, but lethal after that. Don’t get me wrong it was still yummy, but we were both feeling a little off for awhile after breakfast. Still, pressing on! Our next bit of business was a rarity for us: shopping! Neither of us actually go in much for classic browse-through-stores shopping. In our buying habits, as in many other ways, we resemble Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock in “Best in Show” it’s catalogs and websites for us, baybeee. Still, the town is full of all sorts of things we don’t normally have access to, so we poked around the downtown shopping district for just a bit and also mailed some postcards. This done, we moved on to our main event for the day: the Belfast Botanic Garden.

The Botanic Garden is a lovely place – not so much an enclosed wonderland of plants as I’ve seen in some places, but a vast open park with stations of particular interest. There is a classic greenhouse from the turn of the last century, full of ferns and other non-native plants. There is a rose garden that struck me as particularly stark for being out in the open – a big grassy field and, bam, bursts of brilliant color, no transition at all. I don’t know if I liked it, but I appreciate that it was a choice that was made with purpose. There were also wide open grassy spaces with incredibly rare examples of the “Irish Sunbather”, rarely seen in the wild. We poked at everything, even braving the more modern, greenhouse-esque “Tropical Ravine” which had multiple climate-controlled zones and which all felt like saunas given the weather outside. Or, more personally, it felt like we were back home for a few minutes. Flee!

Adjacent to the Botanic Garden is the Ulster Museum (Ulster is one of the four provinces that make up Ireland; I’m not clear if the division still has any practical meaning or if it’s purely traditional, although is is true that Ulster lines up 1:1 with Northern Ireland’s territory, sooooo… yeah) which, while modest in size, is actually a heck of a museum. It contains levels for art, history, and nature, kind of like a Smithsonian sandwich. However, as we have remarked in the past about the British National Gallery, sometimes boiling a collection down can render a truly rich exhibition space. Other than being exposed to some truly wonderful Irish artists (which, honestly, is the whole point of such a place) we couldn’t escape noticing that the Game of Thrones influence even extended here to the cultural center of town.

Game of Thrones influence, you ask? Why, have I not mentioned this before? Goodness me! Yes, the television series “Game of Thrones” has been filming in Ireland, north and south, for a decade now, and the new spinoff series “House of the Dragon” will continue to do so. Belfast is often a hub for their filming projects, and the series has benefited mightily both from the industry of producing the show and the swaths of tourists that have been attracted to see the sites of their favorite episodes. (And before anybody says it, I don’t care if you hated season 8 or whatever; I stopped watching the show before it was cool, maaaaan, and anyway don’t yuck other people’s yum) They had intricately woven models of three dragons hanging in the main hall of the museum, and in the crafted arts section, where things like precious porcelain and samples of exquisite lace were on display, so too was a 90-meter tapestry commemorating the entire run of the show. Apparently it was on permanent display after it’s triumphal(?) exhibition in Bayeux. Yes, Bayeux. As in the Bayeux tapestry. Say what you will, that takes chutzpah if nothing else. Sadly, we were starting to run out of gas after long hikes in the sunshine + clomping up and down the museum halls, so we cut the visit short. Partly, we do this to leave ourselves something to anticipate on our next trip(!), but also because we were tired and we wanted to stop.

Lisa, as per usual, had researched the area near the Gardens for restaurants of note, and thus we took a quick walk down to Darcy’s. I don’t know what saint guided us there but I thank them. Darcy’s is really just a classic pub serving food, but dear gods are they ever good at it. Lisa had a seafood chowder, I had a homemade chicken and ham pie (think pot pie but turned up a thousand percent) and we split a toasted soda bread with cheddar cheese. Any of these things, including the bread, could be the last thing I ever eat and I’d die happy. It really was a spectacular meal.

The rest of the day consisted of getting back to the hotel, followed by a scurry out to do a load of laundry, some pre-packing, and a bit of Great British Bakeoff before we now go to snuggle in for the night. Talk about cliffhangers; this was written in real time so even we don’t know what’s in our next post. Let’s all find out together!

We woke up, feeling much closer to normal people after both going to bed and waking up at reasonable hours. Normal start or no, we decided to give breakfast a miss because our first and main activity of the day was a “Secret food tour of Belfast.” We don’t go in much for tours but this one tickled our fancy (with apologies to Sublime) so we took a chance. It turned out to be a yummy if slightly strange experience.

Our tour met at Belfast City Hall, a natural and obvious site in the middle of downtown. Our tour guide was pleasant enough, and it was a small group of 6, so our hopes for a good time rose quickly. Then, he proceeded to give us a good 15 minutes of general Belfast overview and all I could think was “does he think this is our one, single, 4 hour block of time in Belfast that we parachuted in for and will immediately exfiltrate via the river afterwards?” (Ok, that may be a reconstruction after I’ve had time to gather my thoughts, but you get the idea.) The food tour doesn’t need to go all 101 on all things Belfast. Especially since, upon doing the introduce-yourselves whip ’round it turned out that the other 4 people were 1) a local girl, 2) her boyfriend, 3) her brother who moved to Australia years ago where he met 4) his wife, so more than half the tour lived in the freaking city. Annnnyway, despite failing to read the room he still got on with it before too long. Honestly, the irritation might have had something to do with the whole skipping breakfast thing I mentioned at the top.

Our first stop was Jeffers, a bakery with deep historical roots in the city. The main take away from this first stop was that the recipes our grannies have passed down for soda bread are flat out garbage; the real thing is suuuuuper yummy. We had soda bread sandwiches with a healthy portion of bacon in them (full stop; why mess with something so good?) and were well-pleased. Then it was across the street to a fine foods-type shop called “Sawer’s” to sample some local cheeses, smoked salmon, and accompanying noshies. Bit of local lore – according to our tour-mates, everyone in town calls it “Sawyer’s” and are perpetually surprised when someone points out that the sign doesn’t have a “y” on it. Huh,

Our next stop was down the road to Belfast’s longest-continuously-operating bar, and if that sounds like a tortured description you can bet that other pubs in town split the hairs a different way to make their own longevity claims. In any case, it’s where the Presbyterians gathered in the late 1700s to plan their doomed rebellion. (We’ll talk more about the Presbyterians at a later date.) Why were we at a pub on a food tour? Why, to drink flights of whiskey and discover what was different about them of course! The look of utter bafflement on his poor Irish face was precious. No matter, I’ve been hanging out with drinkers all my adult life; besides, Lisa tried them because her disdain for spirits wasn’t going to go down well after my abstinence. I asked her which she preferred just now and she shook her head and said “I didn’t.” In our defense, it was a food tour. Anyhow, the next stop was also a pub, specially chosen because it was known to serve a lot of Guinness and, apparently, slows-selling Guinness leads to stale Guinness(?) so this was important. Guinness was downed (she liked that better) and then we had hearty portions of classic Irish stew. (What makes it “Irish”? Lamb, apparently.)

After a brief, perfunctory stop at a cheese shop to class things up a bit, we made our way to Sunflower, a bar that provided two oddities. First, it is the only bar in Belfast that still has the security cage at it’s front door, which served exactly the same purpose as a gatehouse always has – slows down potential attackers to keep the people inside safe. Yeah, Belfast was a special place in the middle-late 20th century. The second oddity was that they had Beamish on tap. What is Beamish? Well, in the words of the bartender it’s “Catholic beer.” Yep, Belfast. Anyway, Sunflower was a nice spot on the edge of Belfast’s gay district. (That sounds weird coming off the tongue, so to speak, but that’s the right term, right? Like, how else would you describe the Castro?) After Sunflower we finished up at the Dark Horse, which is where our header photo comes from. It’s a fancier pub, and a nice place to end up. We had our choice of whiskeys and/or Irish coffee. Again, the sign said “food tour”. Oh well, I had a coke and Lisa nursed an Irish coffee, and we had a lovely last bit of chat with the rest of the tourists before parting company. We had plans to do something else but were feeling kinda stuffed and and kinda tired, so we punted for the hotel and a quiet evening. Tomorrow’s agenda was loosey-goosey so we’ll just kick today’s plans down the road a bit. Cliffhanger again! How does he do it?!