Robert's Blog

Time for Farewell! My last (half) week in Belfast has passed quickly.

On Monday I met a few classmates at the continental market in front of the city hall. You can describe it a bit like a Christmas market without jewelry. There were a lot of stalls with different dishes and a couple with odds. Overall, I was not particularly impressed and after the others had brought something to eat, I went home again.

In the evening I met with Giuliano on the occasion of his birthday and cooked him something nice (but he did the most preparation 😄).

On Tuesday I met Tim at the Ulster Museum. The museum has numerous exhibitions with various themes, mainly art, history and science. So there was a lot to see and marvel at. After that I went shopping for the last time mainly for my travel provisions. I had already tried to get rid of cash in the previous weeks so that I did not have to take any pounds back to Germany unnecessarily. I didn’t even have enough cash to pay the 45 pence of expensive flour and had to use my card.

On Wednesday I primarily prepared my trip to Berlin. My suitcase had to be packed, meals prepared (I took chocolate banana pancakes with me) and groceries were consumed and sorted out. At the end of the day I left a lot of spices, sauces etc. to my roommates. I also checked the plane tickets again. With Ryanair you can redistribute the seats and so I had it set up so that our group were all sitting in the same part of the plane.

In the evening, I spontaneously decided to go for a walk through Belfast to say goodbye to the city. This lasted a little longer than planned and I walked across the city for over two hours.

On Thursday I had to get up at 3 o’clock, the taxi was supposed to arrive at 3:45 am. Accordingly, there was not much sleep at night. Especially because someone in the neighborhood had been holding a party. At 4 o’clock we were at the bus station. First we had to get the tickets. That turned out to be more difficult than expected. When Kristina visited me, she could pay her bus ticket by card. Because it was very early in the morning, the main building of the station with the ticket office was still closed and the bus driver accepted cash only. Luckily there was another one from our group, Dominik, who had the same problem and with whose card one could withdraw any amount of money. So we asked for the next ATM. Unfortunately, this was also in the closed main building. Dominik had to start sprinting to find an ATM outside and I stayed back to take care of our luggage. The line in front of the bus was getting smaller and the departure time was getting closer. I tried to call Dominik, but got no connection. Time was getting closer and I started looking for alternative means of transport. Luckily, however, Dominik came running round the corner and we could still board the bus.

After approx. thirty minutes we arrived at the airport, checked in the suitcases and went to the gate after a short wait. There, a queue formed relatively quickly. When scanning the tickets there was another problem. Four of us were not assigned a seat. As it turned out, there was a problem in Ryanair’s system and all of the passengers I reassigned were affected. So we had to wait while the flight attendant was on the phone and finally assigned seats to us manually.

After these little adventures the flight was quiet and we arrived on time (!!!) in Berlin. There I was immediately greeted by Kristina 😊

I had an exciting time in Belfast and the experiences and experiences will definitely be remembered for my life.

This is my last blog post. Thanks for reading! Goodbye!