Wednesday 27 May 2009

We went to America on Monday!

Okay, so not really, but it did feel like it.

We went to the Ulster American Folk Museum. It is a huge open air museum, you start off as a poor starving Irish peasant. You look at the way they lived, tiny smokey damp wet houses full of lice and rats. You are starving because of the Great Irish Famine.

A blacksmith's house, they must have suffered with lung problems.Then you move up the ladder a bit to the middle class houses (still in Ireland) and then onto the rich families (those who emigrated out of this bunch did so by choice not starvation.)Each child in the family had their own chair, made to size.One of the wealthy family's sun dial, in Ireland!This is on the second floor, it is the chimney, so big because the family would have hung their meat up by the fire to smoke it. You could have stood 12 people in the fireplace, it was huge!
Corbin the tenant farmer farming Peat, no, not Pete his dad, Peat the fuel.The last you see of Ireland is this town street at the harbour. Then you go into the building and onto the boat that will take you to America. You were only allowed up on deck if the captain gave you permission, so if he wasn't feeling too kind then you spent the full 5-8 weeks (weather depending) down below in steerage. Again, lots of rats and lice, although the sailors liked the rats because they believed that if there weren't any your ship was going to sink.

One family to a bed! Nobody slept well.
Then you come off the ship and you are in America! (I think they did that really well, the fencing is different, the trees are different, the houses are different, you actually feel like you have stepped into another place.An American farm house, that is corn growing in the field, it is covered in plastic because in reality it was still in Ireland and there is not enough sun to grow it properly, so they were trying to encourage it by heating it in the plastic.An old fashioned lathe. They used string to shape the wood.

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