Durham is a small town a few minutes away from Newcastle. It’s really really small – basically a massive Cathedral and a university with a few streets attached to them.

It’s a beautiful town, nevertheless. With its magnificent Cathedral, the beautiful Castle, the river, the small shopping alleys and beautiful nature just everywhere around, I get why people study here in what seems like the middle of nowhere if you’re used to Edinburgh and its loud and jammed streets.

Anyway, after lunch in a pizza place just by the flooded river, Susie and I decided to make the best of the comparably good weather and climbed Durham Cathedral. We got an amazing view over Durham and its surroundings, and again, you notice quickly how small this town is once you’re up there. It’s also surprisingly exhausting to get up there, so once we managed to get back down, we got to a fancy cake place to replenish.

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I went to York on Valentine’s Day 2014. It was a bit random a choice; I had nothing to do on the weekend and decided to go somewhere. York was close, sounded familiar and looked nice on a map. York is a comparably small city. With a few 200,000 inhabitants, it is about the size of Freiburg or Saarbrücken.

It’s also ancient – literally. York was founded in the late 1st century AD and prospered under the Roman emperors, being the capital of Britannia for some time. I did Latin and History for five years, but I never noticed how much of Roman imperial history actually took place in York: A whole bunch of emperors hung out here, and Constantine the Great first usurped the principate here.

Surprisingly much of that Roman city has prevailed. It’s a bit like a smaller version of Rome – Ancient, Medieval and Rennaissance stuff are everywhere. You can take a proper 5k walk on the remains of the Roman city wall, and „remains“ isn’t really the appropriate word here, because the walls are basically all still intact. You can find the Roman Bath, a pub in the middle of the city, whose owners started digging for a cellar a few decades ago and found an entire Roman bathhouse; today, this has been turned into a sweet and tiny museum just under the pub.

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This weekend I have been in Belfast. It was definitely one of the most impressive trips so far.

Belfast is the capital of Northern Ireland. As such, it is – other than (South) Ireland – part of the United Kingdom and actually British. That means that you can spend UK money, use your UK phone, buy UK stamps, and so on. This sounds convenient, but has created a deep split in the population of Northern Ireland: the split between those people who would rather be Irish („Unionists“) and those who would rather be British („Loyalists“). This split created the euphemistically named „Troubles“ from the 1960s until the late 1990s.

The Troubles and the „Wall of Peace“

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