It’s now the evening of a lovely Saturday in Belfast, with blue skies, a nice breeze, and lots of folks out and enjoying the city center. Wonderful weather to welcome most of us to the city! (Those who arrived a day or so early had quite a bit of rain yesterday, I hear.)

After over two years of planning, and with many thanks to Fulbright UK (Jessica McIvor and Lisa Sadler in particular) for their incredible work, 35 NAFAns have made their way to Belfast to start what will be, for many of us, a 17-day Study Tour. With Fulbright UK, we’ll visit twelve universities, starting in Northern Ireland before working our way through Scotland and then into England. For those of us staying the full time, we’ll wrap up in Oxford and Cambridge. We’ll also meet with multiple fellowship organizations in addition to Fulbright UK, including the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission, the Rhodes Trust, the Ellison Institute of Technology, Gates Cambridge, and the Churchill Scholarship.

Arriving in Belfast, some of us took the opportunity today to walk around the city and check out the Titanic Museum. Seeing the harbor and shipbuilding area of Belfast was beautiful, sobering, and historically interesting, and we took some photos of the famous Salmon of Knowledge on our walk over! I was especially impressed by the sheer number of different nationalities onboard the Titanic – a reminder of how global the world was well over a hundred years ago (and a nice tie-in to our time with Fulbright).

We wrapped up the day with a wonderful welcome dinner at Morning Star: amazing food and fantastic conversation, with wonderful hospitality from Fulbright and the folks from Queens University Belfast.

A great start to what will certainly be an amazing trip, with our volunteer tour blogger-participants sharing daily highlights of each stop as we journey through the UK!

 

– Christie Harner, she/her, NAFA Trip Leader
Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education for Fellowships and Scholars Programs at Dartmouth