The Titanic.

 Over the Christmas break, I decided to watch the movie The Titanic.  The last time I had watched it was with Kevin in 1997 (the year it came out).  He and I had went to the theater in Thousand Oaks, CA.   I am not sure what possessed me to re-watch it.  When I asked the girls to join me, they initially were not interested.  Before I knew it, they were glued to the screen and had a thousand questions.  How many people died?  How big was the Titanic?  Where did it sink?  How far down is the wreckage?  The movie is over 3 hours long, so I believe we ended up finishing it the next day.  

Last week I read that the artifact exhibit was at the Discovery Center here in Boise.  We decided to check it out.  

It was very well done.  When we first entered the exhibit, they gave us each a passenger card with information about one of the Titanic passengers.  

There were scale models of both the ship and the wreckage.

There were glass cases of artifacts that had been recovered from the wreckage field.  The exhibits were both amazing and deeply sad.  There was so much about that ship sinking that was a tragedy.  In one of the rooms they had a lifeboat lad out on the floor in which you could stand and get spacial awareness.  Many of the lifeboats went out half empty.  Even more tragic was that there were not even enough life boats for all of the passengers, had they went out completely full.  

It was also interesting to learn how the ship had been dubbed 'unsinkable' and that the iceberg had compromised enough of the ship that too many of the watertight compartments would be filled with water, precipitating the inevitable.  They had rooms set up that looked like the various rooms the passengers would have stayed in.  

At the end of the exhibit was a memorial wall.  We were able to look up the passengers that we had on our cards to determine their actual fate.  I think one of the most impactful things for me was to see the impact social class had on the ultimate fates of so many lives.  More than  half of the first class passengers were saved.  This reversed entirely as you went down in social class.  No matter the class, the sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy.  So many unforeseen events occurred, so many mistakes were made, and so many lives were lost.  If you have the opportunity to visit this exhibit, it is worth it.