We’ve been in Atlanta for almost three months now, and today we finally got to go to the Titanic Artifact Exhibition. It’s being held at the Atlanta Civic Center until May. We’ve already missed two shows from waiting until the last minute, Cirque Du Soleil and Spamalot, so I’m really glad we got to see this.
When you get started, you’re given your ticket, which is actually your “boarding pass”. On the back is the name of a passenger aboard the Titanic. You learn their age, where they’re from, who they are travelling with, what cabin they’re in, their reason for being on the Titanic, and some interesting facts about them. You’re told you’re this passenger for the tour, and you’ll find out at the end whether you survived. So not morbid at all.
My passenger’s name was Mr. Emil Brandeis, who is 48 and travelling alone, having boarded the Titanic in Cherbourg, France. He is returning home after his annual four-month trip to Europe, where he visited his niece in Italy and his sister in Switzerland. He is from Omaha, Nebraska, owns a department store, and must be rather wealthy, as he is a first class passenger.
Brenda’s passenger is Mrs. Maria Penasco from Spain, 22, who is travelling with her husband Victor and a servant. They also boarded at Cherbourg and are extending their two-year honeymoon with a transatlantic voyage on Titanic.
We then were given these nifty gadgets that looked like the combination of a long remote control and a telephone. Every so often, you’d punch in a code shown on the wall, hold it to your ear, and hear some narrated facts. Pretty cool.
The exhibit was very well done and put together. From an attraction standpoint, it was top-notch. There were a lot of really nice artifacts on display, some huge, some tiny. Everything was enclosed in one-inch-thick glass cases that all had humidity and temperature sensors in them. I can’t imagine the difficulty in preserving pieces like those.
The thing that struck me the most is how hard it is to wrap your head around the fact that these are not replicas. What you’re looking at was actually at the bottom of the cold, black North Atlantic, 12,500 feet down. Before these pieces were recovered, the last people to touch them were passengers or crew on the Titanic, who may or may not have survived. It’s pretty eerie.
A highlight of the tour is “the big piece”, which is a 17-ton portion of the ship’s hull, complete with 3 portholes. What’s interesting is they show you a diagram of the ship and where the piece was located. When seeing it in that scale, you start to get an idea just how gigantic the Titanic was. It’s also interesting that it took over two years to prepare and preserve the Big Piece for display.
The also have a big iceberg mockup, actually made of ice. They have you feel it so you can actually get a feeling for how unbelievably cold the water was that night. I can’t even imagine the feeling.
I could go on and on, but long story short, it was well worth it. And unfortunately, Mr. Brandeis, my passenger, did not survive. Brenda’s did, however, but her husband did not. It’s an interesting and effective way to make the whole thing a little more real.
At any rate, if any of y’all make it down before May, we’ll gladly take you to see it if you want 