This is the story we heard. Back in the 90s, people didn’t really go into West Belfast, but an Australian guy asked some cab drivers to take him on a tour of the area. Most refused, but one agreed, and that was the beginning of the Black Taxi tours of Belfast. (Incidentally, our car was white.)

This is another story we heard. The areas were so dangerous that bus service was discontinued in them, so people brought in some taxis from London (black ones), and started essentially doing bus routes in them. Now that things have settled down, bus service has continued, but the black taxi service remains. Those actual black taxis are different from the tourist ones, but they’re still around.

The tour guide was.. I don’t know, maybe in his mid-fifties, so he’d lived through most of the roughest parts. He basically just took us around, stopping at buildings and streets that played important roles, explaining the different murals and the people they depicted. Really a great way to see the city and gain a better idea of what really happened here, though I reckon the quality of the tourguide changes a lot. Our was great.

I didn’t really have a grasp of the scale of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, even after visiting the museums. They built walls around sections of the city. Houses near the walls had cages surrounding their backyards to protect them from bombs from the other side. The gates would just close at night, on Fridays for the entire weekend. The wall is still standing, and even optimists think it will be there for another twenty years. Most of the schools are still segregated. Hard to imagine that something like that exists in such an otherwise modern country, but then, you know, there’s a lot that’s hard to imagine / true about the US.