Belfast Tour and some Maynooth pictures (13.12.)

Here's another reason why I wasn't ready to say goodbye to Ireland and why the Farewell Party was premature. I still hadn't been to Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland. Sure, we had been driving through it when going on the GoT Tour and to the Giant's Causeway. But that's like landing at Dublin airport only to go to Maynooth. It doesn't count as having been there. So I hadn't properly been to Belfast.
Anyway, this tour was the last one of the three tours organised by the International Office I had already booked during orientation week. So I had always known that I would go to Belfast just before the end of the semester. (The date was - next to the price - a reason for many people not to book this tour: studying instead of touring, please!)
Unlike the week before my alarm worked and I had no intention of being late again. Especially since the street had been slippery the day before I decided to leave the house really early just to make sure I wouldn't be late. This led to being on campus way too early, of course... But since it was December and quite cold (no snow to be seen though) I used this opportunity and took some pictures of wintry Maynooth:

Next to the annoying field quite early in the morning...

South Campus again. <3 That's my desktop background at the moment.

But nice Maynooth pictures are not what this post is about. After standing around in the cold a bit we could finally see our bus coming that brought us to Belfast.
The first part of the tour was going to the Titanic Experience, a museum-like something about the Titanic. The real ship, not the film with Leonardo DiCaprio. Of course, the cinematic history of the Titanic was also covered but in the first place it was about the real events. That's because the ship was actually built in Belfast, just in case you didn't know that (I didn't ^^).
It was quite interesting in there, because you could see how the ship was built, what it looked like on the ship, what happened in the night of its sinking, how the wreck was examined on the bottom of the sea and so on...

It even looked interesting from the outside:

The rest of the day was basically free time. The bus driver drove us to the city centre of Belfast, told us about a few interesting places we might visit, told us when the bus would leave for Maynooth again and then kicked us out of the bus at the City Hall.

Anyway, that's where Belfast's Christmas market happened to take place, so we (including Vansch who was in Belfast on her own that day) went there. It was nicer than the Christmas market in Dublin, I'd say, but we didn't buy anything. The prices were around the same as in Ireland or Germany - only in pound instead of euro. xD

Then we spent ages looking for something to eat. But we managed to do other stuff as well: checking out a few streets of the city centre, going to some market, having a glance at a shopping centre (not for shopping but because it looked nice) and going to the cathedral. And we were almost punctual when going back to the bus... I mean, it hadn't left without us and we weren't even the last ones!