Titanic

This weekend, I went and visited the soon to be departing exhibit of Titanic artifacts at the Whitaker Center in Harrisburg, and saw the IMAX movie: Titanica. It was an interesting exhibit, though not as large of an exhibit as I had hoped for. On checking in for our assigned ticket time, we were issued a boarding pass for the exhibit. My mom and I switched tickets to have passengers closer to our own ages. The tickets had brief details about our assigned passenger, and then we were turned loose in the exhibit. Mine was 1st class passenger Dorothy Gibson, an actress. The exhibit walked you through the construction of the Titanic, through examples of the principal rooms, including reconstructions of both a 1st class cabin and a 3rd class cabin, with various artifacts from the rooms in display cases. They also had a display of dishes, dining services, and kitchen items. The final section showed personal items that had been recovered from the wreckage. The most amazing to me was all the paper that had survived. In many of the displays we had already seen, the wood had been eaten away, but somehow, letters and labels on bottles managed to survive, many with the ink clearly legible. At the very end of the exhibit, they had a list of the passengers, and you could check to see if your "passenger" survived. Both of ours did, though I discovered later through Wikipedia that my passenger was actually on the first lifeboat lowered.