Touring Ireland

 

My tour guiding course continues, this time with a trip down the Ards Peninsula and to Mount Stewart (above). We had a tour of the house, home to Lord and Lady Londonderry for many years and now owned by the national trust.  

The head gardener also gave us a tour of the amazing garden and I saw giant shamrock, the likes of which I've never seen before.

 

I also did my first ever paid tour recently - a one hour coach tour of Belfast - in Spanish! It took a lot of preparation and not a little help from my mother but I got through it without any major disasters and am really quite proud of myself. The tour ended at the new Titanic Belfast museum, below.

random photo of the day: revealed retro

 

Old signs revealed during work at the Fountain Centre, Belfast.

Weird weather

 

 

This time last year this corner of Ireland was enjoying a freak heat wave. This year we have a freak snow fall, in March! Climate change deniers please take note.

 

Now I love the snow, but the sun gods really need to make an appearance soon; I'm still itching to get my new tent up!

Happy (belated) St. Patrick's Day!

This year Belfast City Council pulled out all the stops and put on a four day festival for Saint Patrick's day and I was drafted in to do origami and papercraft workshops for three days.

 

We made shamrock badges, hairclips, necklaces and origami shamrocks and four-leaf clovers with kids from one to a hundred (more or less) and it was great craic, the only thing problem being that I was kept so busy that I hardly got a chance to take many photos or indeed to take part in some of the amazing other traditional crafts that were on offer.

 

I hope you all rose a glass for luck on Sunday, wherever you were in the world.

Happy Birthday Hubby

 

For Danny's 36th birthday we hired out this amazing little cinema in Comber, just a few miles away from Belfast.

 

The Spence brothers have built two 1940s style cinemas just down the lane from one another, using materials reclaimed from local cinemas as they were refurbished or closed.

 

 

Look at the beautiful interior! A friend who was there with us remarked that the place reminded him of the Regal cinema in Limavady that he'd grown up going to, and it turns out that the seats came from that very cinema! Northern Ireland is a very small place.

 

 

We watched pretty much the best film ever made, 'The Princess Bride'.

Haven't seen it?

Inconceivable!

 

 

 

Happy birthday husbando.

 

 

Once a carnie, always a carnie

I led one of my paper craft classes at the Crescent Arts Centre on Sunday and we did a couple of new crafts, including this big top made from an old book. I've been making book trees (below) for the past couple of christmases but never realised that by making just one fold instead of three, you end up with this circus tent design!

Wouldn't it be cute decorating a kid's room or birthday party? My lack of offspring won't stop me from displaying it in the house though. I like it because husband Danny and I met while working at a giant ferris wheel in Belfast so we're practically circus folk ourselves.

In Sunday's class we made the book trees/big tops, 3-D hanging stars, streamer garlands, giant paper pompoms and origami crane garlands. If you fancy learning some papercraft all of my classes will be repeated in the next term of the Crescent's jam-packed programme. 

  

Sunny evenings and beachy days

I appear to have woken up in an alternate universe where Ireland gets long sunny days and you can leave the house of a morning confident that you won't need a jumper later. Unheard of!

We spent a lazy evening at our friend's apartment down by the river Lagan, enjoying the views and lovely dappled light (and a few bevvies). I hope you've been out getting all the goodness from the sun's rays.

Then at the weekend we took our bikes on the train to Helen's Bay which is just outside Belfast. We found a private walled area just off the beach so that I could bask in the sunshine like a lizard while Danny lay in the shade.

I had great intentions to have my first swim of the season but in the end wasn't brave enough for anything more than a paddle. Even that was made difficult by the thousands of shell creatures everywhere.

Hoards of people swarmed the beach every half hour as the train from Belfast arrived so we made an early exit and went for a cycle in the blistering heat. Not that I'm complaining - This week has been heaven to me.

Long may it last.

Lost & Found workshop

The lost and found exhibition at PS2 will be finished this Saturday and after then I promise to blog about something, ANYTHING else, but for now, here is a post about the free papercraft workshop we had there on Saturday.

About 10 people squeezed into the space to learn how to make newspaper pompoms and some origami designs. It was great to actually get people using the space. Afterwards a few of us hung out for a drink and a natter. How I wish this were my permanent home in the city.

Thanks to all the lovely people who came down - to the old friends and the new friends I made.

My journey to work

This is the view I get three mornings a week on the train to jordanstown.

Belfast is quite a pretty city really.