The sinking of the Titanic has always been interesting to me. After watching James Cameron's Titanic over ten years ago, I did some research on it and was kind of obsessed with it. Well, almost eleven years later, I got the opportunity to go to the Titanic Artifact Exhibit with my sister and best friend from high school, who I saw the movie with several times.
It was amazing. At the entrance you received a boarding pass, similar to the one the passengers got when they boarded the ship. On the back of it there is information on an actual passenger of the Titanic, at the end of the exhibit, we were to look up the name on the list of lost and survivors and see whether our person had died or survived.After getting our passes and listening devices we got our picture taken in front of a green screen. You begin the tour with a model of the ship, information on the creation and building of the ship and on the captain of the ship. There are actual objects recovered from the wreck like, rope, and valves and parts of the ship with information on how it was recovered and preserved.
You then go through a set of doors that lead you through the entrance of first class. Everything has been recreated, the walls, decoration, chandeliers. You are in First class of the Titanic, the details are amazing.
You see china, money, a toilet, mirrors, hair accessories, things recovered from the wreck, things seen, touched, and used by the passengers of the Titanic. There is a model of a First class room, the bed, dinning table and vanity with a small mirror.
The next set of doors lead you to third class, which the passenger on my boarding pass was in. You immediately notice the difference from first class, everything from the walls to the noise that was heard from the engine of the ship. You then see a model of what a third class room looked like: two sets of bunk beds and a small table in the middle. At the end of the hall was a gate, identical to the ones in the movie.
Next stop, the engine room. The room is dark and noisy. You see the engines and smoke, there are big chunks of coal recovered and information on how much coal was needed to run the ship.
The rest of the exhibit focuses on some passengers and objects recovered that belonged to these passengers. One that sticks out in my mind is the small perfume sample bottles that belonged to a passenger that was a perfume salesman. He survived but went on to doing something else. The perfume bottles are still in the leather bag that he carried them in and they say that you could still smell the different smells of perfume.
The list of passengers was divided by first class, third class, and crew members. I looked up my passenger, Miss Bridget Delia Bradley, and found her name in the list of survivors.
The exhibit is dedicated to Millvina Dean, the last titanic survivor, who died at the age of 97 last year.
Two days after going to the exhibit, my sister and I watched Titanic and cried like crazy. We looked up our passengers and learned a lot about their lives before and after the sinking of the Titanic.
