England, Scotland and Ireland!

Old Trafford - Home of the world's most famous sporting club, Gunchester United.

Why wouldn't this guy be stuffing his face with late night kebabs?

Gothic style cathedral in ye old York town.

Our ghost walk leader, who somehow evaded all attempts at photography, leading me to believe that he may have been in league with the spirits...

Cartoon-like streets of York.

A boring look down Newcastle's river.

Edinburgh Castle, the infamous location of the "missing Randy incident". Also the scene of several lesbian weddings.

Looking out over the windy Scottish capital.

Ireland!

Aimlessly wandering through the Portaferry graveyard.

West Belfast mural dating back to The Troubles.

So...much...Guinness...

I must apologize again for the lack of updates, but being in the 1st world again somewhat hinders blogs. Unlike poorer countries that have internet cafes on every block and let you do whatever you want to their computers, the internet here is somewhat harder to find and most of the systems are locked away, making it impossible to upload photos. Anyway, enough of that.

Randy and I left Liverpool for the city of Manchester in the afternoon and arrived a few hours later (one fantastic thing about this little island is the tiny, tiny travel distances between destinations). To put it bluntly, Manchester sucked. I had heard it was a bit of a grimy, thug ridden town, but I've heard that about other places and they usually seem to work out, Manchester...not so much. It didn't help that our accomodation was essentially in one of the city's ghettos, and to get anywhere we had to walk past gangs of ASBO collecting street toughs. Every guy we came across in the city seemed to want to either fight us or fight someone close to us. There was a plethora of overweight teen moms blowing smoke in their baby's faces while their "husbands" looked at every near by guy as a potential target. We spent the majority of our one night out in the city at a fairly low key pub and just when we were thinking maybe things weren't too bad a group of football hooligans burst through the door and started one of the biggest bar fights I've ever had the pleasure of watching. The bouncers were helpless as these guys ripped into a nearby table, stomping one guy, then another, and finally when the mom tried to stop them, they took her out too.

We happily left Gunchester, as it's known by locals, for the city of York, but first making a quick stopover in Leeds. We only had 4-5 hours in Leeds, but it instantly had a better aura to it then our previous location and therefore will forever go down as quite a nice city in my mind. Arriving in York, we quickly found our hostel inside the old castle walls then headed out for some Sunday roast. York is pretty much how you would picture a medieval English town or city looking and has little aspects of every army that has ever occupied it, including the Romans, Vikings and Scots. After reuniting with Steve (who flew back from Paris), we ventured into the city's nightlife for a bit before returning home. The next day was spent wandering around through the winding, cobbled streets of the old city and eventually enlisting in a Ghost tour, led by a local "ghost expert". York is apparently one of the most haunted city's in the world, and for an hour and a bit this guy basically tried to freak us out as he told a few of the stories with a staged voice and from behind his 1700's era cloak and hat. If nothing else it led us to the Golden Fleece, the most haunted pub in the world, for a few good pints.

Leaving York we travelled north to Newcastle for another two nights. Not much to report from this city, aside from their strange obsession with bridges. It seemed like a bigger, slightly cleaner version of New West, where we basically watched football and children's TV shows after we had seen the few sights. From Newcastle we grabbed a bus farther north and into the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. Every so often there's a city where you come to the conclusion that if necessary you could live there and Edinburgh fell into this category. After exploring the giant castle that dominates the centre of the city, eating some Haggis and sampling some of the local scotch, I left as a huge fan of the place, aside from the constant and powerful winds that never seem to take a break.

Steve left us in Edinburgh the same day Randy and I headed west to Glasgow. I hadn't heard the nicest things about Glasgow, with most people recommending Edinburgh instead, but from what I saw it looked alright. We only spent a single night there, so this opinion could be subject to change. Randy and I barely squeezed on a ferry the following day and headed across to the neighbouring island of Ireland. Our first stop in the land of green was Belfast, which was also quite a bit nicer than I expected. During one afternoon the two of us strapped on our flak jackets and ventured into West Belfast, which is infamous as the playground for groups like the IRA etc. during The Troubles. There are still a ton of signs to tell you that everything isn't quite alright up there, including the heavily fortified police stations, the police cars that look more like miniature tanks than land rovers and the numerous murals that are painted on almost every surface of the city. Walking around West Belfast you pass from Catholic neighbourhood to Protestant neighbourhood constantly with the only indication being the murals changing from IRA support to UFF support. The people didn't seem to mind two obvious outsiders walking through their close knit communities taking pictures of their artwork, but we were both happy to get out of there once the sun went down.

The two of us also travelled an hour or so out of Belfast to a quaint little village called Portaferry. Aside from acting as a reason for getting out of the city and into the Irish countryside, Portaferry is also the former home of a Mister John Scanlon, or the great great great grandpappy of yours truly. There were other nearby towns and cities with closer relations, but Portaferry seemed to be the most picturesque of them all. I had been told that Big John's gravestone was in the local cemetary, and so, upon arriving, we walked up to the Portaferry graveyard to try and find my resting ancestor. Unfortunately, after two hours of looking around, we came up empty handed. I eventually asked a few of the old men who seemed to be puttering about, and after calling over another old man, they held a council to decide what to do to help the lad from Canada. Much of their decision making was totally indecipherable to me as their countryside accents dipped to a level I didn't know existed. In the end it was decided that I should head over to the garage in town, turn left, walk down two houses and wake up old Ian ("cause he tends to sleep late ya know"), the undertaker. He could then provide me with some kind of index to the cemetary and help me find this Scanlon fellow's grave (which they had all claimed to have seen). I didn't actually follow up on their suggestion as I wasn't that inclined to do so, but regardless of finding the headstone, heading out to the little village was still a cool experience.

Yesterday we departed Belfast and bussed it south into the Republic of Ireland's capital, Dublin. The jury is still out on Dublin as it seems a little overpriced for what it's offering. After we leave this internet cafe, the two of us will be headed over to the Guinness Brewery for a tour of the drink that caused me so much pain this morning. I didn't think it was physically possible to drink more than 5 pints of the black stout in one sitting, but last night proved otherwise. Two more nights will be spent here before heading south to the city of Cork for our St. Patrick's day celebrations.