Aye, I'm in Belfast, you know

Hiya (typical Belfast greeting)

Well, I'm currently in Belfast, having left Italy, stayed overnight in London at my friend Evie's place and arrived (on a very small plane that was quite empty) in George Best Belfast City Airport. Think Avalon, but smaller!

I thought my flight to Belfast was a domestic flight, but aviation security in the UK is insane. Flying anywhere at all is not the simple affair it is in Australia, what with the distances to the airport, early check in times, queues, 20 minute walks to departure gates and the fact you are lumped in with the international departures (ie fluid and hand baggage restrictions). I think I showed my passport about 4 times before I boarded and then put it securely away once on the plane, figuring I would not need it again. Turns out I was wrong. On arrival, we all had to flash our passports (or UK ID) before we could proceed to baggage collection. Being the only foreigner on the plane, I got pulled aside and questioned about my purpose in Belfast! Luckily I seemed to answer their questions adequately and they allowed me into Northern Ireland!

Then I was in for a shock. Coming from Italy, where whilst it was fun to practise my Italian, it was hard work to understand people, I was looking forward to communicating in English again. It seems not. I was reminded of this as I struggled to understand the safety briefing on the plane, and it hit me full on as I arrived and hear the voices around me. Despite their broad accents, the locals also seem to speak incredibly fast, leaving me utterly lost. I think I'm getting used to it now, having been here a week, and actually really like the Belfast accent. I can also use some Belfast phrases: Aye, I'm taking the wee lad for a dander, you know.

I've been here a week doing my elective and have noticed some interesting things. Firstly the Oncology unit is very new, having opened in 2006 and thus is very nice, with clean and attractive wards.

Some of the differences: junior medical staff here are assigned to wards and not teams (eg ward 4, not the oncology team), hence they spend all day on the ward doing everyone's general running around. Patients' notes seem to be a lot messier, they have separate files for their oncology notes and they are full of separate plastic files, unfiled pieces of paper and so on. They also seem quite reluctant to start a new file, hence some of them are overflowing! However, they are coloured by year, which makes filing and finding them a lot easier. Many of the notes are dictated and typed as well, preventing the inability to read handwriting! But some are handwritten and there seems to be no standard format or page that notes are to be written on. The obs charts are very well layed out, with coloured bars indicating danger levels and instructions as to how to manage them (eg temperature).

Medically, the patients I've all have quite serious cancer (mostly metastatic- cancer that has spread from the original site) and are often on 2nd or 3rd treatment options. The doctor I am with is The Melanoma Guy for all of Northern Ireland and hence my first few days consisted of nothing but skin cancer!! The melanoma rates here are not as high as Aus, but the Irish skin is very susceptible to it, and the incidence of melanoma in people without a history of sun exposure is probably higher than in Aus. All of the melanoma patients I've seen have had particularly nasty and fatal disease. Partly, it is because the healthier ones are treated in GP/dermatology/outpatients settings, but it may be that Aussie GPs/dermatologists (and indeed patients) are more aware of it and hence find it earlier.

Belfast itself is a nice city, in some ways it reminds me of Adelaide, in terms of its size and so on. It's very easy to get around as everything is within walking distance and there are regular buses. I've found the people to be far friendlier than they look, and very eager to talk about Australia. Most know someone who lives or has been there, but I find that apart from Sydney they know very little about the place. One thing I have noticed: I think Belfast is a little ambivalent about whether they want tourists. On one hand, they have the logo, the slogans and the tourist bus. Their public transport is very regular and their signage around the city is excellent. There is some great architecture and history. They've made some efforts to promote the sites, however many of the brochures have the wrong information, the main sites are closed on the weekends and their advertising feels a bit empty and doesn't really hit the mark- not really distinguishing it from any other city. I think they are still rebuilding from a past they may be overshadowed by, and to be honest, don't really have enough tourists to justify opening on the weekends. I had an interesting chat to the guy in the tourist office about this (for about 15 minutes), who was a bit bewildered at the idea of travelling to tick off 'seeing a city', and mentioned his shock at some of the things tourists had said to him, showing no evidence of any thought or research about why they were visiting Belfast. I came to the conclusion that maybe Belfast would benefit from being an Adelaide or Perth in terms of tourism- a lovely place to visit and stay, with some interesting sites and streets to explore, but not somewhere swarming with tourists and major attractions, such as Rome, London or Sydney.

One of Belfast's main industries in the past was ship-building. It was well known throughout the world for its ships, made by firms such as Harland and Wolff, which in its day was the largest ship building firm in the world with the largest dock. One of its most famous ships was the Titanic and its sister ships, the Olympic and the Britannic. All three were built and launched in Belfast and I set off today to discover more about this. Weary world travellers would be imagining it now: titanic pubs, titanic t shirts, titanic water bottles, titanic trails that took in everything from the place that made the rivets to the house of the second bell boy. Well, you're wrong. Belfast's modern day contribution to to the Titanic legacy consists of 1 walking tour (which was advertised as 7 days a week, for 8 pounds but was actually only when there were enough bookings, in a car and costing 15 pounds!), a boat tour (only in the summer) and the Titanic pump house and dock (open M-F only, except for a 1 hour tour on Saturdays and Sundays). The only sites actually available to view are the pump house and dock, although you can walk past the vast industrial wasteland and see the building that houses the old drawing room for Harland and Wolff, and try and catch a glimpse of the slips on which they built the Titanic. Furthermore, visiting these sites is only for the dedicated: it is about half an hour walk from the city along an empty industrial road. So why is this the case? My mate in the tourism place reckons its all political: the subject of the Titanic was apparently taboo, by orders from up high, until recently, as he said "it was designed by Protestants" and there was some question as to whether faulty rivets were used, thereby apparently causing the Northern Ireland government to refuse to talk about the Titanic. Only recently, since the release of the movie Titanic, the powers-that-be have released there is great interest in the Titanic and money can be made from it. Hence, opening 2012 (the anniversary of the ship sinking) there will be a multi million dollar museum, with a simulated submarine dive to the wreckage and all the bells and whistles.

Anyway, back to the pump house and dock: the tour was fascinating. It lasted about 1 hr and we took in the dock in which the Titanic sat for about 3 weeks. The guide had photos taken from the same spots that we were standing in, and rare video footage (bought for 10pence from a garage sale!) of the Titanic entering the dock. The reason the Titanic was 882 ft 9 in long and not a nice even 900ft was that the dock could only be extended that far to squeeze the Titanic in. We then got to see the pump house that emptied the water from the dock and also an old tool shed, in which the engineers had simply left their tools when they left, hence there were Titanic era medical stretchers, rivet hole expanders and other tools. At the end of the tour, the guide emphasized "The Titanic left here OK, it was a good Irish ship!".

After the Titanic experience I walked back through the city and decided to go and see a movie. As luck would have it, the movie "The Reader" was on, a movie based on a book I chose for a year-long year 12 project. The movie was very faithful to the book and I highly recommend it, as it looks the ideas of evil and good though a person who finds out about the past of someone they love, and the circumstances in which people do things they might not have otherwise done. Interestingly, seeing a movie and buying a novel are both quite cheap here, as opposed to buying food. Even a fast food meal (I think about 5-6 pounds) costs more than a movie (4.50 pounds)!

Well, I think that's about done me for today, off to bed now.

Best Wishes,

Anneke