Belfast - Day 1-2

24.10.2016: After a relatively stressful week (with children behaving a bit strangely), I was really looking forward to the weekend on Friday, as we were going to Belfast. Unfortunately, I arrived at my bus stop later due to the errands I still had to do for Belfast. I had to wait for the bus and then caught a bus that was unusually crowded and stopped at every stop. This meant that for the first time in almost 1 1/2 months, I was not 15 minutes early to pick up my youngest host family, but 10 minutes late. Fortunately, it wasn't a big problem because I had informed my host mom beforehand, but it did stress me out a bit. At least it wasn't a problem that I had to leave at shortly after 5 p.m., so I was at least on time for the train to Belfast. We arrived there at around 9 p.m. and had to realize that we had walked in the wrong direction after leaving the train station... We wandered around a bit and finally asked at the information desk, only to find out that we could simply take the next train and get off at the first station. After leaving that station, we also walked in the wrong direction at first, but finally arrived at our hostel at around 10:30 p.m..

The next day, we started by checking out because the hostel did not have a room available for two consecutive nights. Then we made our way to the train station, where our train to Corraine was already leaving at 9:15 a.m. After a 2-hour train ride, we took another bus and finally reached the 'Giants Causeway' (a rock formation made of regular hexagonal basalt stones).

At 12:30 p.m. we were faced with a decision: either go back and take the bus back at 1:10 p.m. or continue walking around the surrounding cliffs and take the bus at 5:10 p.m. We decided on the latter and hiked up to the top of a cliff. However, it started to rain lightly, so we decided to turn back. When we arrived at the bus stop, we saw that the next bus was supposed to come in 20 minutes. While we were waiting, I happened to take another look at the schedule and then realized that we had been looking at the weekday times the whole time, and that on Saturday there would only be one bus at 5:10 p.m.

As a result, we decided to simply walk back to the next village in order to maybe catch a bus there earlier. Alena had read on the internet that there is a path leading from the Giants Causeway to the nearest village, 'Bushmills'. After walking about 1 km along the road (on the about 70 cm wide shoulder), we decided to ask for directions. In the restaurant, which was the only building in sight for miles, we were given directions and the advice to be careful because the road was not completely safe. As we were about to leave the door, a man approached us. He said he was a taxi driver and was waiting for a few girls he had brought to the Giants Causeway. If we wanted to, he could also take us to Bushmills. We were really glad and I think we were lucky more than anything. After only waiting for an hour and a half for the next bus, we took exactly the bus back that we could have taken at the Giants Causeway at 5:10 p.m...

Back at the hostel, we only went to eat at an Asian restaurant (I don't think I've ever eaten Asian food so many times in such a short time).