That was the first thing that struck me as I was driven through west Belfast on my first trip to Northern Ireland. Even with the peace talks, the increases in investment and tourism, and the daily stories of growth and change in the papers, I still expected the city to be divided by closed gates - like a series of interconnected cabinets. True, the Peace Wall still stands, riddled with political graffiti, and stripes of red, white and blue, or green white and orange still mark the kerbsides in some parts of the city. But otherwise it seems like any other place: adults hurry to and from work while children play in the parks. No one is throwing stones and no one is visibly armed. The whole city has an eerie sense of normality.
Jewish and Catholic
I grew up in a lovely area of Maryland, just outside the District of Columbia, that was filled with Catholics and Jews. There were two houses of worship - an orthodox synagogue and a Catholic church. There were two parochial schools, Yeshiva and St Andrew's. Everyone I knew who wasn't Jewish like me was Irish Catholic.
Needless to say, it was a very pro-Ireland place to live. St Patrick's Day was a big event, with everyone dressed in green, even in the public schools. Families took vacations to Ireland to search for their ancestors, and those who did not know where they came from said they were from Cork. And when the Troubles were in the news every day, there was an overwhelming agreement among all the people, Catholic and Jewish, that the British should get the heck out of Northern Ireland.
Of course, with a virulently Zionist Jewish population filling half the area, the two groups were certainly simpatico. After all, getting the British out of Palestine was the first step to the declaration of the State of Israel, and no one was admired more than terrorists-turned-statesmen, such as Menachem Begin and Moshe Dayan.
When my friends and I watched the TV news together, we would see the greyish images of the streets of Belfast, with the burning buses and crying children and running mothers. In our minds, that was what all of Northern Ireland looked like - it was a place of barbed wire, high walls and constant, terrorising misery. It never occurred to us that there were other areas of the city than those shown on the air - or that, perhaps, our sleek, smoothly groomed television reporters were not telling us the whole story.
Peace process
By the time the peace process started to work in the mid-1990s, Ireland had become less of an issue in my life. I was living in Chicago with my half-Israeli husband, and we discussed the Troubles only when we saw stories about them. We saw Bill Clinton hailed as a hero in the cities of the North, and we saw the devastation of the Omagh bombing. As confidence in peace began to grow, we began to think of Belfast as another version of Israel. When the British left there in 1948 the country had not yet really entered the modern age. With run-down housing, a poor water supply and inefficient agricultural systems, the Israelis had to do a lot of work to make their land the modern oasis it is today. But it took them decades to make the desert bloom and to bring telephones into every home. That is how we thought of the North - as a place that would take a long time to get out from under the shadow of the British.
But we were wrong. Only five years into the peace process, Belfast is a brilliant, beautiful, modern city, full of smart restaurants, lively shopping areas and spotless streets. It does not look like a city that has been full of unrest and poverty - it looks like a wonderful place to live.
"I could definitely settle down here for a few years," said an aide to US Senator Jay Rockefeller, with whom I had dinner. "I had no idea this was such a pretty city."
We soon discovered that, in fact, Belfast had long been a pleasant place to live - with plenty of good restaurants and cultural pursuits - for a large part of its population for a long time. However, having been raised on American television, it was something that we had never really heard about. We never imagined that Belfast would be a city with a lot to do.
Millennium project
And soon there will be more to do, with the completion this autumn of the city's millenium project, "Odyssey". This will include an IMAX theatre, shops, a science museum and a 10,000-seat arena. The city is clearly preparing for an enormous increase in tourism.
And the tourist board is planning to use the city's violent, divisive past to increase the city's popularity. Buses full of gawking, amused tourists now roll regularly through the western portion of the city looking at they symbols of the Troubles, which are still very much alive to some. Which prompts the question: if all the Troubles were truly to come to an end, would the tourists still be interested?