BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The 10:10 train from Dublin slid into the station and groaned to a halt, a face in every window, eyes wide and pressed against the glass.
They had traveled only 100 miles, but this was another world. For 25 years, people in the southern Irish Republic had viewed Belfast the way American suburbanites see the South Bronx. Roughly 75 percent of the southern Irish had never spent a night in British-run, strife-ridden Northern Ireland.
Until now, in the season of the cease-fire.
"It's amazing that I am really here," said Joan Flynn, a southerner who had never come north in her 35 years. The Christmas shopper planned to blitz the British retail chains, few of which operate in Dublin.
"I fancied this trip before, but it was always the fear of a bomb that kept me home. You hear such awful things, but once I crossed that border, I saw that the hills were as pretty and green as the ones back home, and it gave me a bit of a thrill."
The first peaceful Christmas season in 25 years has transformed Belfast, to the point where the locals are almost at a loss how to deal with it. In the months since the Irish Republican Army announced its unilateral cease-fire and its Protestant counterparts followed suit, amazing things have happened:
You can ride into town without being stopped at random by British soldiers wanting to know who you are and where you're going.
In the city center, you can actually drive into a parking garage without a sentry demanding to look in the trunk and under the hood.
You can ride the buses without security men roaming the aisles, checking for bombs beneath every seat.
Inside the Castle Court mall, the downtown shopping mecca, you can walk into any store without being frisked, without being asked to open a backpack or handbag.
If you're from the Irish Republic, you can drive here in your own car, with its distinctive blue plates, without much worry of being vandalized by someone who assumes you must be an IRA sympathizer.
"The atmosphere in the town right now -- I can't even cope with it sometimes, it's so good," said Eddie Smyth, a Belfast resident. "You don't have to be looking over your shoulder all the time. It's brilliant, just brilliant."
A year ago, in the aftermath of a bloody October that took 27 lives in the province, "the holiday atmosphere was tense, very tense," he said. "People were just waiting for new responses from one side or the other. It was plain sickening. And now? Well, just the other day, there was a police message on the radio, telling people to avoid Belfast -- because it was too packed with shoppers."
Bus officials report that 100 chartered buses arrive from the south every Saturday; none came before the cease-fire. The Northern Ireland tourist bureau reports that inquiries about the province have jumped nearly 130 percent over the same period a year ago.
It's not just the southerners who are new to Belfast.
"There's a lot of people, unbelievably, who are coming in for the first time even though they live only half an hour from here," said Alex Bell.
What amazes Mary Kearney is the lack of tension in her North Belfast neighborhood.
"I'm Catholic, and we never had much to do with the RUC," the predominantly Protestant police force.
"But now I find out that the RUC man is buying lollies for my wee girl. And he's holding hands with her on the street. I ask her who bought her the lolly, and she says 'Brian.' I say, 'Oh, we know his name now? When did that all start?'
"I don't have to close my blinds at night anymore," she said, a habit designed to frustrate Protestant gunmen.
"I don't have to open my handbag in stores anymore, even though I still do it automatically. It's funny. There are things that become part of your life, and you don't really notice them until they disappear."
Yet Mr. Bell, like many others, refuses to assume that next Christmas will be as joyful as this one. The cease-fires are a start, they say, but it's a long way to a permanent season of goodwill to all.
"There's a psychological dimension to this," he said. "We're like people who've been in captivity for a long time, who get used to being under torture because they've come to expect it.
"But when the torture suddenly stops, you develop great fears about when it might start up again. A lot of us have that feeling at the present time."