Running.

In this blog, I will like to write about my last trip. I train in an athletics club in Soria with some other people. The 2nd of January, some of the guys from my club and I travelled to Northern Ireland. We stayed in a hotel in a small village called Antrim, located next to the biggest lake in Ireland and only 25km from Belfast.

We went to Ireland to run in an International Cross Country Championship that took place 3rd January in this village. During the competition I talked to lots of people. I also met the family which I had been living with during the week that we had been there the year before; it is the second time we have travelled to Ireland to run the cross.

That same day after the competition we were invited to have dinner with the major of Antrim, the president of athletics in Northern Ireland and some important athletes that had been running in the cross. The next day we visited the Giant’s Causeway, a very beautiful natural landscape on the northern coast of Northern Ireland. It is an area with about 40,000 stone columns, all of them with the same hexagonal form. They are the result of a volcanic eruption that occurred many years ago.

On the 5th, we went to Newcastle and we had a walk along the sea cost. Then, we had dinner iat a golf club. A friend of ours that is an athletics trainer in Northern Ireland is member of that golf club. The last day we went to Belfast to see the city and do some shopping before taking the plane to return to Spain. It is a nice town and its centre, around its big town hall, is quite new and modern. We spent five fantastic days in Northern Ireland, the Irish people treated us very well and we had a lot of fun.

Apart from the things that we did there I would like to write about some differences between Ireland and Spain. The first and probably the most important one is the time it gets dark. In winter, in Ireland the sun disappears at 5; at that time it is completely dark. There is no one in the street and all the shops are closed before six. Because of this, the meals they have are also different. They have a good breakfast early in the morning, they have a sandwich or something like that at one o’clock more or less and they have dinner at 6, when they usually return home.

In Spain, we are used to very different schedules. We have a normal breakfast but then we have a proper lunch at 2 or 3. As it gets darker later, there aremore people on the street and all the shops are open till eight so we have dinner much later. The food they eat is different as well. The meat they cook is normally chicken, beef or turkey, but they don’t eat lamb or pork. Fish isn’t usually cooked in Ireland either. Their food isn’t better or worse than ours but, in my opinion, Spanish food is more varied and we have more typical foods from our own country.