Belfast

Saturday we went to Belfast. When I searched in the internet, I found differnt companys going from Dundalk to Belfast. At least I found Aircoach, Eireann and Goldline and I thought all are leaving at the main busstation in Dundalk, the long walk. But I was wrong. When we arived there at 10am, the man behind the information desk told us, that there is no bus leaving before 11.30am. Airchoach, he told us, has their busstation "at the motorway". Later in Belfast we found out that Aircoach actually stops infront of Mc.Donalds in Dundalk, so that we could have reached it if we would have got the right information. But so we decided to have a coffee till we saw that there is another bus leaving to Newry.
We thought it would be nice to spend maybe one hour in Newry instead of Dundalk and we went back to the man at the information desk to ask if we have to pay twice when we take a bus to Newry first and than from there to Belfast. He told us, that that won't be a probleme and that there is a bus leaving from Newry to Belfast every 20min and we wondered a little bit why he didn't suggest us this opportunity before.
We took the bus to Newry, paid the 20 Euro for a two ways ticket and wondered again, because one of us had paid only 16euro when he was there a few weeks ago. But that let me come to another question: Since I'm here nobody can tell me why you have to pay sometimes 7 sometimes 5 Euro to go to Dublin. And why there is a differnece between "drop out" and "pick up" stops. If somebody has discovered this please let me know!

But back to Belfast. After a short stop in Newry, we arrived in Belfast and went directly to the big international Christmas market infront of the City Hall. We had really fun to see Bratwurst and Schwenkgrill boths from Germany, french, spanish and other international boths.
We ate Tartifette, which is a traditional meal in France. It consists of potatos, onions, bacon and cream.
I think you should have seen the Eyes of our frensh friend, when he saw the both. He had some kind of home feelings in seeing and eating it.
After our french meal we decided to make the Busguiding tour through Belfast for 9pounds. I think this is expensive and normally I would prefer discovering a city on foot and on my own, but it wasn´t really good weather and we only had a few hours till it would become dark.
We saw the port where the titanic was built, the painted walls in the west of Belfast and of course the towncenter. The trip took around 1,5hours and then we went shopping and after this in a pub. By the way the booze is really cheap in Northern Ireland! So we had a few bottles with us when we left home at around 10.

On our way back we shared opinion about the conflict. And we wondered how the conflict was being ended. When I was at home I searched for some expalantion in the internet and found very interesting facts at Wikipedia.
For example I got to know, that only on the night from the 30th to the 31 of july 2007, that means 15 days before I arrived in Ireland, the british armee had ended their deployment in Northen Ireland after 38 years.
There are a few more interesting facts about the conflict on these sites:

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
or
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Belfast