Today we left the lovely castle of Lough Eske in Donegal & it took us around 3 hours to get back to Belfast.
Out first port of call was the St George's Victorian covered market on the Lagan waterfront. We expected it to be a craft market but that's on Sunday, Saturday was the farmers market but there were plenty of arts & crafts for sale, along with fresh fish, home made pies & exotic cakes. A singer in the middle of the market seems strange but added a novel ambience to shopping.
Our big event of the day was the Titanic Experience - the new museum & exhibition centre that opened in March 2012. Already nearly half a million visitors have passed through the doors. It took several years & cost £97 million pounds to build & it's located at the original Harland & Wolff shipyard where the Titanic was built.
Out first port of call was the St George's Victorian covered market on the Lagan waterfront. We expected it to be a craft market but that's on Sunday, Saturday was the farmers market but there were plenty of arts & crafts for sale, along with fresh fish, home made pies & exotic cakes. A singer in the middle of the market seems strange but added a novel ambience to shopping.
Our big event of the day was the Titanic Experience - the new museum & exhibition centre that opened in March 2012. Already nearly half a million visitors have passed through the doors. It took several years & cost £97 million pounds to build & it's located at the original Harland & Wolff shipyard where the Titanic was built.
The building overlooks the slipway where it was launched & it's a glistening structure designed to reflect elements of the ship, the sea & that fateful iceberg. In its day (1912) the Titanic was the largest moving man-made object & the building captures the essence of its vastness with steel ships plates & a labyrinth of escalators that mimic gangways zigzaging through the cavenous atrium.
It's much more than a static exhibition, it's an interactive & experiential museum, on an epic scale - like the ship. An engine room experience has huge video walls of gigantic pistons that are hissing & thumping as they power the ship.
Different sections have physical & CGI reconstructions, life in the cabins, old black & white footage, memoribilia, the original distress calls & voices of survivors. Then there's the full story of exactly what happened, how it sank & finally the 21st century discovery & exploration of the wreck - two & half miles down on the north Atlantic seabed.
There is also a section exploring various myths & fictional accounts of the sinking of the Titanic along with a host of films. There was also a sister ship called the Olympic which after being recalled & refitted sailed regularly until 1935.
Even though the twentieth has seen horrors & disasters on a scale that dwarfs that tragic night of 14/4/1912 when the Titanic sunk - nevertheless this tragedy continues to fascinate people to an extraordinary extent.
It's much more than a static exhibition, it's an interactive & experiential museum, on an epic scale - like the ship. An engine room experience has huge video walls of gigantic pistons that are hissing & thumping as they power the ship.
Different sections have physical & CGI reconstructions, life in the cabins, old black & white footage, memoribilia, the original distress calls & voices of survivors. Then there's the full story of exactly what happened, how it sank & finally the 21st century discovery & exploration of the wreck - two & half miles down on the north Atlantic seabed.
There is also a section exploring various myths & fictional accounts of the sinking of the Titanic along with a host of films. There was also a sister ship called the Olympic which after being recalled & refitted sailed regularly until 1935.
Even though the twentieth has seen horrors & disasters on a scale that dwarfs that tragic night of 14/4/1912 when the Titanic sunk - nevertheless this tragedy continues to fascinate people to an extraordinary extent.