I survived titanic, and other adventures from cobh

My pictures from last weekends trip aRe marked by palm trees and pretty harbor views , but I did not spend last weekend in spain (soon!). Instead, I took a very quick bus ride to a port town called cobh to kill a saturday morning. Situated on a harbor off the Atlantic ocean, cobh's biggest claim to fame can't found in the town itself but instead in the emigrants who left ireland through its ports.

 Sparked by the 1840s great famine and continuing throughout the 20th century, cobh served as the last port of call for millions of Irish people. I got a better sense of what forced a quarter of Ireland's population to leave at the cobh heritage center. Some indeed left voluntarily in pursuit of better economic opportunities, but others were deported from cobh to prison camps in australia. I walked through a really fascinating exhibit that focused on the emigration, but I was most impacted by learning about the conditions that emigrants dealt with during their voyages. Especially during famine times, people faced weeks of food shortages (oh, the irony). They spent weeks locked under the deck at night in dark and damp quarters, where they constantly feared getting shipwrecked.

Speaking of shipwrecks, cobh was the final sending port of the titanic. At cobh, 123 irish people boarded the Titanic at cobh. Their stories were told both in the cobh heritage center and at the Titanic experience, my next stop in cobh. Essentially, this is a tour in which you take on the role of an actual irish Titanic passenger. I was nora oleary, a 17 year old in third class. A tour guide walked us along the actual pier from which Titanic left before showing us model third class and first class cabins. Surprise, first class was wayyy nicer! But actually, a first class ticket cost $70,000 in today's dollars. For the price of a small house in 2014, one could buy an absurd amount of priviledges- a library, gymnasium, 14 course dinners, and a pool. In a boat. in 1912. Clearly the ship designers were focused on luxury, to the point that they chose to provide lifeboats for only half the passengers instead of making the first class cabins smaller. Spoiler alert: it didn't go well. Basically, I learned that the Titanic was a preventable human tragedy, but on the bright side I found out that Nora OLeary did survive!

After the titanic experience, I visited st. Colmans cathedral. For some reason I'm having trouble uploading pictures but it's a hulking Gothic cathedral built on a huge hill overlooking both the town and the harbor. Inside, bright colored floral arrangements hang from the ceilings and these crazy sculptures are carmed into every inch of wall space. I'm still taken aback every time I see one of these intricate cathedrals and realize they were built hundreds of years ago with so much less technology than we use today

Finally, I walked along this beautiful pier right before leaving and definitely did not pretend that leonardo dicaprio and I were boarding the Titanic together.