I'm back! It was really interesting - when we handed in our tickets, they gave each of us a boarding pass, and on the back was the name and some information about an actual passenger who was on the ship. Mine was a 15 year old girl from Lebanon (who was travelling with her husband!) At the end of the exhibit, there was a wall with all the passenger names, what section they were in, and whether they survived or not. My girl was travelling 3rd class and I was trying to find her on the list, and the tour girl came and asked if I'd found my person, I said, "She's a girl so I'm sure she survived" and she said, "But she was 3rd class, so that cuts her chances way down." It was a little sad, but I kept looking, and it's weird, but I felt so relieved when I found her name on the survivors list!
In case anyone's interested, here are a couple odd little factoids that I learned today:
When they were building the ship, they were going all out and working really quickly to meet their deadline. Several of the workers heard strange banging noises coming from the lower decks, and there was a rumor among them that one of the workers had been sealed up in between the decks, but nobody ever went looking to see if there really was.
Appx 1500 people went down with the ship, and because it took almost 70 years for them to be able to get down to the wreck, there weren't even any bones left because they dissolved in the salt water. And yet at the exhibit are pieces of sheet music and postcards almost fully intact, some just slightly water stained.
There are all sorts of photos of some of the artifacts 'in situ' on the walls behind the actual artifacts - one was a set of these dishes, they were all together on the ocean floor like someone had put them there. It turns out that they used to be in a wooden cabinet, and the cabinet (with the dishes inside) had come out and landed on the bottom, then over time the wood dissolved and the dishes were still in little rows, it looked really weird.
They've discovered a new species of bacteria and actually named it after the Titanic (Halomonas titanicae) at the crash site, it's eating the metal of the ship and at the rate it's going, the whole thing may be gone in 20 years.
oh and one more kind of spooky thing, there was this guy who was supposed to be travelling on a different ship, but because of a coal shortage he had to change his ticket and go on the Titanic a week earlier than he planned. Before the voyage, he wrote a letter to a friend (who he was going to miss seeing because of having to leave early) and in the letter he said, "I am boarding the greatest steamship in the world, but I don't really feel proud of it at all, right now I wish the 'Titanic' were lying at the bottom of the ocean."
He didn't survive.
Anyhoo...now you know as much as I do!
