Friday August 24 - Saturday August 25th
On Friday we caught a plane to Belfast to visit friends we had last seen on our visit to Norfolk. My sister came too, which was the first time she had been to Northern Ireland. We flew from Gatwick, which is fairly close to home, so we had the great luxury of parking, rather than using public transport. It was a great deal quicker, cost about the same, and meant there were no stairs to haul the suitcase up and down.
On Saturday, which was a fairly cold and rainy day, we celebrated the centenary of the Titanic by visiting the Titanic experience, which was only opened this year.
It is set in what used to be the Harland and Wolf shipbuilding yards, where the Titanic was built. You can see it was quite a stormy day.
The building itself is quite spectacular - though you need a better camera than mine to get a decent photo.
This is slightly less than half of it, there is another similar wing the mirror image of this one, joined by a smoked glass spine.
It is even more spectacular inside
There are huge escalators to get around the various parts of the exhibition. Some parts of the exhibition are also quite spectacular, such as the dark ride that takes you in little cars through a sort of replica shipyard to show you what the shipyard looked like. I did try taking pictures of that from inside the little car, but they were all rubbish. But you get a general flavour of the sights and sounds as you see how the different parts of the ship were built.
After that, there were many interesting displays showing life in and around the shipyards, before you get on to life on board the ship. There is quite a large model of the ship
and there are many examples of the cabins and public rooms. I tried to photograph these, with little success because they are all behind glass, which reflects all the lights.
This is one of the small cabins
This is a Second Class cabin. I photographed all the first class cabins as well, but they were completely surrounded by glass on all four sides, so not only were there reflections from all the lights, there were people looking through the glass on all four sides. There were very interesting displays showing some of the crockery, cutlery and furnishing materials. There were also plenty of photographs of of life on board, and it was interesting to see the contast between the luxury enjoyed by the passengers and the simplicity of the crew's quarters. While the passengers slept in luxurious beds (First Class) or comfy bunks (Second or Third Class), the crew slept on what looked like industrial metal shelving!
I had to give a miss to the films of the wreck at the bottom of the sea - I can't look at undersea things - but I was pretty tired by then anyway, and my feet were sore, so it was time to go home.
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