Monday 4th September 2023
I woke up feeling a lot less feverish and it was great to wake up slowly and not have the 'airport rush', seeing as we were a 2 minute walk from the airport. We ate breakfast after faffing around in the room for a lot longer than we should have, haha.
The flight to Ireland went very quick with us chatting to a lovely lass from Ireland now based in Durham. After a good laugh we were almost spat out into the outskirts of Belfast. The sun was shining cheerfully and it felt surreal being September and Northern Ireland.
My brother had collected the hired car and had waited patiently for us to arrive after flying in from Glasgow rather early. We were taking a drive down to the area where our great great grandparents are mentioned in the family tree research. It was a lovely drive and I still feel like it's stepping back in time when in Ireland. The buildings are old, much like Britain but somehow it feels like it hasn't moved at the same speed as everywhere else.
The Irish are naturally funny to me. Listening to them speak, I tend to focus on the melody of their sentences and not the actual words, so I spend a lot of time thinking if I should have understood what has just been said, haha. There's definitely a connection for me, to what, I'm not entirely sure. We never walked much apart from a short walk to get water, so it can't be the buildings perhaps it's the sheep. My hair has been feeling pretty sheep-like the past few days. So much for my lovely hairstyle in London a couple of weeks ago, haha, or mehmeh.
Sorry I couldn't help the weak joke. My paracetamol are still working their way into my system.
We're spending 2 nights in Ireland, which has Euros as currency, and metric road speeds. And on Wednesday we'll be in Belfast for the night, with British flags and pounds. There's no official border to cross and no real fanfare on crossing the border. It reminds me of early the European Union before the advent of the Euro and the loose borders between Holland and Belgium. I was working on the 2000 European Football Cup and we stayed in Breda in Holland drove mostly to Belgium for my matches. I ended up having two different pockets to keep the Dutch Guilder and the Belgian Franc separate. I'm easily confused haha. Today it's all electronic between pounds and Euros.
Right, I've waffled enough..
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