May have to move to NI for a spell over the next year. Is there any normal places to live?

The vast majority of the place is normal.
Is this for work? Whereabouts is the job to be based? (assuming it is work, of course!)

It's for study in Belfast and the better half will be working. I've been told south Belfast??

The thing I always notice in NI as a Southerner is that your card is marked as soon as you open your mouth. You talk to anyone up there and you don't know if they're Nationalist or Unionist. That's how I like it so you have no preconceptions about people. But they know what you are so you can't really just blend in without people assuming what your politics are by your accent. I take people for people and don't care which they are but I don't like standing out with the accent and in Norn Iron it's not always a good thing to be a Southerner.

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We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.

Rathlin Island's quite nice I hear. :wink: Stay out of Loyalist areas, thats the only advic e I can give you.

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Just 1 gram of cocaine destroys 4m2 of tropical rainforest. Give it up ya selfish b'stards.

Impartial anecdote:

A colleague of mine had reason to spend some time up the North of Ireland recently. He had to go to many different areas and his opinion of the area?

Lovely place altogether, couldnt understand the fuss. He stood talking to some young lads looking for directions under the shadow of a large nationalist mural and didnt feel in any way threatened and the lads he talked to were very helpful and pleasant. He had similar experiences in areas which seemed to him to be staunchly loyalist too (I think it was the proliferation of union jacks that aroused his suspicions?).

What is strange (or not as the case may be?) He's a dyed in the wool cockney with a thick accent and to all intents and purposes could be a para in civvies, yet at no time did he feel in anyway different than in the south.

Nice tale I thought I share?

My opinion? Lots of normal areas, but alas, some disturbed people, although thats anywhere really isnt it?

Yea, if you can afford it!
Stranmillis, Malone and Lisburn road are the "traditional" areas for student/professional housing.
Around Queens university (the so called Holy Land) is OK as well.
But stay on the University side of the Ormeau Road!

The Donegall Road/Village area is an option for less expensive housing near the university/hospitals - but probably not advisable if you have a broad Irish accent.

Is it Queens you're going to or "the other one"?

Would you advise him to live on the Falls or the lower Ormeau?

i lived in derry for 2 years and i thought it was good crack, maybe two small after a while.

good humour all round, drunkin conversations about politics are sometimes best avoided thou.

belfast is meant to be good

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ahhh feck off

To be honest, that's probably good advice ANYWHERE.

parts of it are still a bit rough, but it's a LOT different to what it was 30 or even 10 years ago.