Northern Ireland

Hi there! I'm back and it is time for me to post my second blog. As requested by other fellow blogger, todays topic will be on the place where I studied, lived, eat, sleep or whatever for, well 2 years and 9 months.

Right! Belfast is situated in the northern hemisphere in a country call Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is a part of the UK and Belfast is the capital city. You can found a rough figure from google's map. Click here http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&tab=wl&q.

Just beside Northern Ireland lies the Republic of Ireland. Well, I think most of the ppl will know this country. Heard of Trinity college? Guiness?. These are the landmarks for those who want to visit Dublin, the capital of Ireland. I will make a topic of Ireland later, now back to Belfast first.

Belfast , well I considered it as a small city myself. It's not really big as KL but the ppl here are really nice and friendly. They will greet you on the street even though they don't know who are you. One thing that really amazed me from KL ppl are the car drivers. They are so nice to stop and let you walk across the road even you are not on the zebra crossing. Well, if in KL I think you will definately get scolded by the driver or even get hurt..em no more comment about this.

One of the major attaractions is the Belfast City Hall in the city centre. Completed in 1906, this buliding is made from Portland Stone and is in the Classical Renaissancee style

Belfast City Hall.

Well, I got this picture from wikipedia...haha. I remembered I didn't take any picture of it even I have studied at here for so long.."pai seh". Anyway, this is the real city hall. In the summer, you can see a lot of ppl sitting around the city hall garden, enjoying sun bath and chatting around. Belfast is a really nice place to relax and a nice place for holiday but......not a good place for girls though. Why? coz not many shopping centres around the city for the girls to enjoy their time for shopping. The biggest shopping centre is only like 1/10th of midvalley, I believed. So, for any guys who like to have a trip with your girlfriend, this is a good place to save ur money...haha...well, girls no offence ah..

Now, the next place I'm going to talk about is my university. The Queen's University of Belfast is one of the tourist landmarks in Belfast. Every year around this time, a lot of tourists from all over the world will come here for holiday. Most of them are from the States. Do you know that most of the Americans origin are Irish? According to their history, a lot of Irish migrate to the states long time ago (mebbe during 18th century) to avoid famine that's happening during that time. Okay, no more history for this, let's talk about my university. Although it is not really in the top of the UK league tables but the EEE course is consider top 5 in the UK. Same goes to the pharmacy, civil engineering and medicine courses. Lots of Malaysian studying medicine and engineering PhD in this university. The main attractions is the the Lanyon Building.

QUB Lanyon Building

This building is designed by Charles Lanyon when the school was founded in 1845 and opened in 1849. Well, that's pretty old right but the buidling still stood strong as major repairments/renovations taken place over these years to preserve its native nature. Most of the tourist buses will stop by and loads of tourists will walk around and take photos. That's all I can talk about my school.

The next destination is not in city but is about 140km from the city. The Giant's Causeway, I can say is the main attraction in Northern Ireland. Situated in the north coast of Northern Ireland, this place is very nice during summer or autumn but freaking freezing during the winter. This place is famous with its hexagonal shape stones (basalt columns) along the coast, and also being declared as World Heritage by UNESCO.

Hexagonal shape stones

One of the main sites

The top view of the causeway

From the info board, it said that the formation of these stones is cause by lava around 60 million years ago. Anyone that interested can go to this website to have a look on the history. Well, it also have two different legends. Guess what, the name of this place is named after the legends. You know, Giant's Causeway. Get interested? click here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant%27s_Causeway.

Wow, I think that's too much info for you guys or girls who read this blog. Well, actually I'm quite lazy to continue. I'll add some more in due course but at the minutes that's all I can say about Northern Ireland. Hope you will get a glimpsed of this nice and facinating country. Finally, thanks for spending your time reading my blogs.

Cheers!