Foreign Perspectives

As always the Heritage Days weekend is a bit hectic so today the schedule included a family fun day, the Titanic tour and Springhill.

The tour basically takes a run along the harbour emphasising various spots that had a role in the history of the Titanic or of Belfast shipbuilding generally. It starts off in what was one of the oldest parts of Belfast harbour but which has since seen the most renovation work so, at the moment, is the most modern area in use although that’s going to change soon when building of the Titanic Quarter is completed.

As with the architectural tour we saw a number of places where we’ll be going back to for a more detailed look. The first major one of those is the harbour masters office, then it continues on past the various drawing offices where the Titanic was designed. Along the way you get to see the pillars which are the only visible part that remains of the giant slipway built for the Titanic. They’re constructing a gigantic Titanic exhibition at the end of that and there are some plans to restore at least part of the slipway. From there it’s on past some of the older parts of the docks before reaching the Titanic pump house where the Titanic’s dry dock remains completely dry after almost 100 years. That’s having a special opening later in the month when we hope to have a closer look.

The whole tour runs to around an hour and would be reasonable value at the normal £10 (£30 for families) price though obviously if you’re not in a rush it would be best to wait for the Heritage Weekend next year as it’s free then.

Part of the European Heritage weekend was a trip round the architectural highlights of Belfast. Not much was said about it in the little writeup other than naming four or five places which looked interesting enough. Many freebie events are abbreviated in some way and as this was a one-off bus trip we were expecting something like 40 minutes or so but it ran for a relatively packed two hours of sightseeing or rather site-seeing which is more than a tenners worth of value these days so we’re off to a good start for the weekend.

It started with a couple of orbits around the city hall which highlighted just how historic many of those buildings are. The City Hall itself dates back to 1898 and it built on the site of the Linen Hall, many of the major buildings surrounding it being former linen warehouses. There’s a duplicate of it in Durham, South Africa. In those days linen along with shipbuilding were the major industries of the city. Starting from the city hall many of the public buildings continue to use the Portland stone (from Dorset) which it does. Amongst all the white stone there are a number of sandstone buildings and those two materials are still used in many of the landmark projects to the present.

From there we were off towards the Falls Road passing the former Poor House (now a retirement community) and a little collection of unique buildings around Clifton Street including the heritage listed former Methodist church. Round the corner from that is St Peters cathedral which, despite its age, looks quite modern from the outside. We’ll have a return visit to a number of buildings in that area later on.

Along the way we went past Queen’s University which was the only building that Queen Victoria was brave enough to visit as it was felt safe from the cholera epidemic that was sweeping the city at the time. The plague pit in the Friar’s Bush cemetery is still not considered safe and is the reason why the road narrows at that point.

Heading on out of the city took us past the shipyard and, of course, the newest addition to the city: Titanic Quarter which is adding around 1/3rd to the overall built space of the city so should have quite a major impact once the project is completed. That leg took us to Parliament Buildings which has a lot more symbolism than I imagined: 365 feet wide for the days of the year, 7 stories for the days of the week and six columns for the six counties.

We were getting a little bit overdosed on architecture by then but on the way back into the town picked out a number of unexpectedly unique buildings eg the catholic church close to the halls of residence, the remains of the oldest house in Belfast and, of course, the many Victorian and Georgian buildings that you generally ignore as you pass them.

Definitely a worthwhile trip.

The weekend events start on Friday with, for us, an architectural bus tour of Belfast. Not sure where it goes but we’ll find out later today.

Next up will be the Titanic boat tour on Saturday afternoon which the kids are really looking forwards to. After that we’re toying with a dash off somewhere else though we’re not decided as to where as we’re not sure how long the boat tour is. We might even fit in part of the family fun day at McQuiston church though that would make for a really packed Saturday morning.

Sunday it’ll be the Ulster History Park plus possibly Springhill, both of which have been on my list for a while now.

I think we’ll need a bit of a rest on Sunday night!

or, rather, the same perfume but at a lower price.

As always, the way to get this is via an online retailer like discountfragrance-online.co.uk who strip away all the expensive demonstrators and fancy chairs and provide you with the same perfume that you could buy in the fancy shops but at a considerably more sensible price.

Of course, in reality you don’t save that much money on such things but what you end up with is a much higher quality of perfume for your money. The only downside is that you can’t make it a last minute thing as you need to allow for a few days in the post.

Last year the Kumon class that the little guys go to began the year with they could turn up any time which was handy although in practical terms most people seemed to come at close to the same time all the time. Whilst that was fine for us, the growth in class numbers meant that some times were getting unmanageable with so many people. So, later in the year time slots were allocated and the numbers levelled out quite well.

This year there’s been what appears to be a massive jump in numbers attending the classes with a number of older kids turning up too. The effect of that was that today whereas there’s usually two or three at a table there were four or five at each table for pretty much the whole hours. Moreover, my little guys who normally complete their work in around 30 to 40 minutes were shepherded out before they’d had a chance to finish it “to let other people get a chance” after they’d been there for around an hour. Not only that but John’s English work has been cut in half seemingly only because there was no chance to complete the work in class; that’s work that he normally finishes in around 10-15 minutes at home.

The problem this time around is that there doesn’t seem to be any possibility of either increasing the number of time slots nor of increasing the number of tutors available (because there just ain’t the room to accommodate them). Which implies that it’ll just get worse as the recruitment drive seems to be continuing with even more new students starting on Tuesday.

So it’s looking like we’ll need to look elsewhere for our tutoring. At the moment Kip McGrath looks quite promising as it sets limits on the numbers per class compared to Kumon’s seemingly unlimited student numbers.