Tuesday:
What do the 12th of July, parades, traffic, and dangerous riots at night have to do with each other? Well, that is a holiday here in Northern Ireland. We tried to stay away from the raucous night, but we did see a parade while we sat in traffic. :)
The other main event of the day was visiting the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum! This is not your usual museum where you walk around a building while observing and reading about artifacts. Rather, a whole town has been recreated to show what it would've looked and felt like over 100 years ago. We met Andrew at the entrance, then with maps in hand, began our exploration. The town came first and we stepped in and out of apartments with small, bare bedrooms, a simple kitchen, and a small parlor with a coal burning fireplace. Other buildings included the candy shop, a shoemakers house, a bicycle shop, carpenter workshop, we played old children's games such as spinning a wheel with a stick, jump rope, stilt race, and a potato sack race. We visited a few churches (one with box pews that families would buy and use on Sunday), coal yard, a print shop, newsroom, post office, a bank, courthouse, a fancier house, one-room schoolhouse, a draper's shop where we saw the lady actually use the spinning wheel and loom to finish making cloth. In the rural area, we visited several country homes, a Corn mill, then took a shortcut to get to the flax mill, another school, a meeting hall, a forge where the guy was actually using the furnace and original tools to work with, and saw several animals such as chickens, a rooster, cows, sheep, pigs, goats, and geese.
The best part was when my mom woke up a chicken with her Tesco plastic bag. Once the chicken was up, it kept looking at the plastic bag and following my mom...even as we walked up the main road! It finally got distracted by other kids, but we couldn't stop laughing while it followed my mom! We then tried an experiment with the other animals. When we got to the goat section, mom would shake the plastic bag and you would not believe how fast those goats ran over! Even the pigs stopped eating and hustled over to the gate! We're thinking that maybe they feed the animals from plastic bags. :)
We also heard a story about the goats. The smaller goat's mom just died a couple weeks ago. It would constantly cry and run around looking for it's mom. The other goat used to live by itself and would always try to escape. It loved being around people and would try to get out of the field to follow them. Well, recently they brought the two goats together and they are now best friends and always stay with each other. (insert "awww" here)
We also saw the funniest looking chicken ever. It looked normal until the head, which had a large Afro of feathers encircling it's head. Literally an afro.
From there we walked to the transport section of the museum which was more of your typical museum except that you could walk on and play with all the trains, buses, trams, etc...that were exhibited.
Did you know that the Titanic was built in Belfast? I learned this fact since being here and the museum had a special exhibit called the Titanica which explains how it was built, how it sunk, and gives testimonies of people who were on it at the time. For about fifteen minutes, a lady "named" Violet Jessup (she was a real person at one time but this lady was acting to be her) recalled her experiences on the Titanic as well as the two other sister ships that also didn't meet happy endings (one crashed and had to be repaired, the other hit a mine and sank within one hour). Her Titanic experience was that she was a stewardess for the cabins in first class (and was only paid 2 pounds 10 pence per month!). When the Titanic hit the iceberg she was fortunate in that she was assigned to go on one of the last safety boats to leave the ship. As they were being lowered, the captain yelled for her attention and handed her an infant to take care of. She had to keep the baby warm all that night until the rescue ship came at 4am. Once they were on the boat and everyone was looking for their loved ones, she sat with the random baby until a woman came up to her, looked at the baby, looked at her, then took the baby and walked away. Violet wasn't sure if that was the mom, or if the lady couldn't speak English, but she just hoped he would be ok. Many, many years later when she was old and retired from working on ships (amazingly she went on to work on ships for another 40 years!) she was sitting in her cottage one night when she received a phone call. The person asked if she had been on the Titanic when it sunk. Then he asked if she had been given a baby to hold. She replied yes. The person then told her that he was that baby, and because of a storm outside the phone line was cut off, but at least she knew he was alright.
After walking around a little, we were all tired (I think mostly from yesterday's hike) so we decided to go home. We said goodbye to Andrew, shopped for groceries on the way home, had tacos for dinner, then watched Over the Hedge.
Ps. Now that we are all using one bathroom, I discovered that we brought five containers of toothpaste with us!! Granted, two are almost used up, and one is a mini one, but i thought it was so funny when I realized how many we had. :)
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