Diskurswelt.de

Sunday evening, after visiting the Giant’s Causeway, we arrived in history-laden Derry, which is also known as Londonderry.
There, we checked into the cosy Derry City Independent Hostel. At least about half of us did.
For some reason almost all beds in the hotel and the bed & breakfast were already gone before we were asked to form groups for the rooms. I guess one had to be best firends with at least one of the members of the committee in order to get one of those… left a bad taste in my mouth.

I shared a room in the hostel with nine other ITT students and it soon turned out that the hostel was much cooler than the more luxurious accomodations. It is located in the centre of Derry, has good, clean facilities and is managed by a nice, talkative young couple from New Zealand & Australia. The best hostel so far – recommended!
We felt so welcome there that we decided to spend the night at the hostel instead of going out. Thus, we just bought subs and some cider and joined our hosts in the living room, who watched the second half of „Burn After Reading“.
Afterwards, a friend of them, a local, joined our elaborate club and told us stories about his childhood and youth in the epicentre of „the Troubles“ where heavily armed soldiers on the streets were a daily occurence. The Australian guy played some classics on the guitar – that was pretty cool – and talked with Chris, who outed himself as a Dutch-Australian, about his lovely home country.

Somehow the others must have found out that the place to be was the hostel. Alas! Almost all of the 45 participants of the trip crowded the hostel’s living and dining room – our Kiwi host was not amused. The Frenchmen, who came into the living room where we sat, killed our conversation. They sat in between us and loudly started French conversations with each other, which excluded us de facto from participation and made the Irish guy leave the room. What a pity. Until then the evening had been very cool. I’ll definitely talk to my French friends about this in the coming days.
We spent the rest of the evening playing cards (peste) and wisecracking in our room („Sing me a song, you’re a singer, cook me some food, I want dinner…“).
That was not too bad, but our conversation in the living room had been way cooler.

After a tiny breakfast we went for about two and a half hours into the city in order to get a proper coffee (mission accomplished) and some snacks (mission failed) and see some of Derry’s historic sights.
Here are some photos:

Now, you might be surprised and think „Hey, isn’t Derry famous for Bloody Sunday, Free Derry, the murals etc. I did not read or see much about this in this post although I always thought that Felix was interested in that topic. Strange.“
Okay, maybe you did not think this, but let’s just assume you did. If you’re also interested in „the Troubles“ and the stuff mentioned above, you might look forward to my next post. If you’re not, you’ll just see some impressive photos that might arouse your interest.