Belfast

Belfast is only 2 hour away from Dublin and though it's not usually a must-see tourist city in the UK, but as the capital of Northern Ireland, I thought I may as well see what's there to visit!

Lucky Salmon

Did you know that the Titanic was built in Belfast?
I didn't until I got there! There's actually a really great museum all about the Titanic, White Star Line and Harland and Wolffe, the company who built it. It's a huge museum and you can easily spend two or three hours in there, with lots of interactive and replicas of rooms in the ship, blueprints and even a special section where you can interactively explore the Titanic wreck. The museum is built right next to the original yard on the pier where the Titanic was built and you can actually walk right on the spot where it was built!
Fun fact: the Titanic movie with Leo DiCaprio cost about $200 million to make... 22 times more than it cost to build the real ship. Crazy right?

Titanic Museum

The Titanic was built on the left

Right next to the museum, you can go explore the SS Nomadic, the last existing White Star Line ship in the world! You could go on the deck and inside the different rooms, even sit at the bar (though the bartender was a projection of a man....) and imagine what it would be like to take a cruise on one of these boats.

SS Nomadic

The craziest part about the then-shipyard is that the company had to actually dig out the river and make it bigger so they could get the big ships out to sea! The river used to be quite thin and now it's very wide and square, all man-made.

I didn't spend a lot of time in Belfast, but I really enjoyed it. So many of the buildings are beautiful red brick buildings, the city hall looks amazing at night and one really cool thing? There's a glass dome at the top of a shopping centre that you can go in and you get a really great view of the city!