When I was eleven years old, there was something wrong with you if you didn’t know who Leonardo DiCaprio was: star of the blockbuster Titanic, which all of my friends had seen at least two or three times in theaters, “Leo,” as we called him–as if he were all of our best friend–was the dreamboat of my generation.
It’s strange to think that that was more than a decade ago; it was more than ten years ago that my aunt took me to see Titanic even though my mother had strict rules against PG-13 movies before the age of 13, and it was from my first summer camp that I wrote her a letter confessing what I felt to be the most unforgivable work of deception that I had ever committed.
Luckily, my mother forgave me, and even went on to trust me again, so much that she let me flee the country at fourteen, striking a match that lit my wanderlust ablaze–wanderlust that has led me here, to Cobh (pronounced “cove”), the last port of call for the actual Titanic as well as the Lusitania, two ships that would never see another port again.
I expected Cobh to be vaguely creepy–something about the idea of hundreds of ghosts not knowing where to go after being stranded at sea had me expecting some sort of ghost town. While the old-fashioned signs pointing towards Cork and Dublin may make it seem as though not a day has passed, however, the only real tribute to the famous ship that spawned the famous movie is a small plaque that hardly bears mention and is easy to miss: we walked past it twice before finally noticing it.
I am glad that we stopped in this tiny town on our drive from Cork to Killarney, though: in a small park named for the only Irish-Catholic to ever be president of my country, we dug into a spread that has become our staple meal over the past few days and looked out onto the port of a typical small Irish town: bread, hummus, vegetables, ham and a giant bottle of that ubiquitous British condiment known simply as “brown sauce.”
While I’ve enjoyed seeing some of the bigger cities along the way, it’s these tiny stopovers that make this trip completely different from any other I’ve taken. I loved looking at its brightly colored houses and watching the fishermen spend their afternoons casting off a dock into the port. We only stayed a few hours–just long enough to gobble our lunch and climb back into the car–but I didn’t mind.
