Wales on a good day
Early March 2014 took me to Wales. Rachel had announced that „it might stop raining on Saturday“, but the general approach was more of a plan-ahead-for-rainy-days. But it would turn out very differently from what we thought.
Marischal College
Yesterday morning, I left Edinburgh to go to Aberdeen. Aberdeen is the third-biggest (190k) city in Scotland, following Glasgow (600k) and Edinburgh (450k). It is basically all the way up north on the east coast.
Durham is a small town a few minutes away from Newcastle. It’s really really small – basically a massive Cathedral and a university with a few streets attached to them.
It’s a beautiful town, nevertheless. With its magnificent Cathedral, the beautiful Castle, the river, the small shopping alleys and beautiful nature just everywhere around, I get why people study here in what seems like the middle of nowhere if you’re used to Edinburgh and its loud and jammed streets.
I went to York on Valentine’s Day 2014. It was a bit random a choice; I had nothing to do on the weekend and decided to go somewhere. York was close, sounded familiar and looked nice on a map. York is a comparably small city. With a few 200,000 inhabitants, it is about the size of Freiburg or Saarbrücken.
It’s also ancient – literally. York was founded in the late 1st century AD and prospered under the Roman emperors, being the capital of Britannia for some time. I did Latin and History for five years, but I never noticed how much of Roman imperial history actually took place in York: A whole bunch of emperors hung out here, and Constantine the Great first usurped the principate here. Weiterlesen
This weekend I have been in Belfast. It was definitely one of the most impressive trips so far.
Belfast is the capital of Northern Ireland. As such, it is – other than (South) Ireland – part of the United Kingdom and actually British. That means that you can spend UK money, use your UK phone, buy UK stamps, and so on. This sounds convenient, but has created a deep split in the population of Northern Ireland: the split between those people who would rather be Irish („Unionists“) and those who would rather be British („Loyalists“). This split created the euphemistically named „Troubles“ from the 1960s until the late 1990s. Weiterlesen