Our plans for the day were to start with a visit to the Ulster Museum. No, this is not a museum full of ulsters, but rather a museum devoted to the Ulster area. Historically, Ulster is a province consisting of nine counties. Six of these counties now make up the region of Northern Ireland, and the other three are part of the Republic of Ireland. Sometimes people refer to "Ulster" and "Northern Ireland" interchangeably, but this is not accurate, and such a practice risks offending people from the Republic of Ireland, as it short-changes their country.

We started the day with a look out of our hotel window, which gave us a view of a large parking lot, a temporary-looking BBC building, and a little bit of the Europa Hotel. The Europa Hotel is a luxury hotel, once favored by journalists, that holds the distinction of being the most bombed hotel in the world, as it was bombed 28 times during the Troubles.

The Ulster Museum was within walking distance of our hotel, but it would have been a long walk, so we took a bus, and we were dumped out in front of a large old building which turned out to not be the museum, but rather the main building of Queen's University Belfast. Out of curiosity, we walked through the gate and into the building, known as the Lanyon Building (completed in 1849). Inside we found a small entrance hall, with a stained glass window (completed in 1939) and a statue of Galileo (by 19th Century Italian sculptor Pio Fedi).



Across University Road from the Lanyon Building we noticed an interesting-looking church. This turned out not to be a church at all, though it started out this way, when it was built as a Presbyterian church in 1872. It's now called Elmwood Hall, and is used as the concert hall for Queen's University.

Continuing south on University Road, we took a slight fork to the left, passed the entrance to the Botanic Gardens (more on this later), and found the Ulster Museum.

The Ulster Museum has existed in one form or another since 1821, and has lived in its current building since 1929. It is the largest museum in Northern Ireland. It's not real clear what the main theme of the museum is. In some ways it's a natural history museum, in others a human history museum, and in still others a display venue for the fine and decorative arts. A number of exhibits have no obvious connection to Ulster, besides being located in a building called "The Ulster Museum". Which might be the theme. Regardless, there is a large collection of interesting exhibits, and admission is free.

We started by looking at art and decorative objects.



Continuing, we made our way through a lot of stuffed birds:


Stuffed mammals came next:



Insects were not forgotten, though this display was not very big:

Many rocks and minerals were attractively displayed.



This was followed by remains of extinct or endangered creatures:





We veered into human history at this point, finding a small ancient Egyptian exhibit.

There was a fairly elaborate exhibit covering the wreck of a ship called the Girona, from 1588. The Girona was a ship from the Spanish Armada, a vast fleet of warships that was decisively defeated in that year by the British (and some bad weather). Some of the surviving Spanish ships, including the Girona, were attempting to take a roundabout route back home (see map), and the Girona ended up sinking off the northern coast of Ireland. A number of artifacts from the wreck have been recovered, and many of these were on display.



This was followed by exhibits more specific to Irish history.




And there were exhibits whose connection with Ulster or with each other didn't immediately spring to mind:



The next point of interest we visited wasn't hard to find, as it was immediately outside the front entrance of the Ulster Museum, and partially surrounded the building. This was the grounds of the Belfast Botanic Gardens.