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Opened from nine to nine, seven day week, with a budget among fifteen and twenty dollars, visitors will have the chance to transform for a couple hours into one of the 2, 228 passengers of the Titanic.
When I arrived at the exhibition last year, people in the entrance gave me a very curious ticket, which resulted to be a boarding pass, an exact replicate of the original boarding pass used for people to board the Titanic on April 10 of 1912.
For one and a half hour I transformed into Julius Van der Planke, a 31 year old guy from Belgium, who was traveling to Ohio -to be the new foreman of the Continental Sugar Company- with his wife Emilia, his best friend Victor Vandercruyssen, his brother Leo and his sister Maria.
Conformed by 12 outstanding acclimated rooms with special music, sounds and atmosphere illumination; the perfectly divided display shows you the ship diagram going through its sinking phases.
People can see original planes, scale reconstructions, one of the gigantic whistles of the ship, an identical reconstruction of the first, second and third class halls, a replica of the bedroom, smaller objects such as a pocket clock, a diamond ring, a bracelet with the name Amy on it, a bathtub, exquisite sets of dishes with gold details, a little broken but extraordinarily preserved by the sea; champagne and wine bottles, ceramics, clothes, shoes and three postcards exclusively brought to Puerto Rico, not showed before in any other exhibition.
In addition, the Puerto Rico's display was selected to show for the first time a series of bills and currencies recently rescued in 2004.
The special and numerous collections of artifacts and objects have been showed around the world since the first diving excursion in 1987, which recovered some 1, 800 objects in the course of 23 dives; since then the RMS Titanic Inc. (organization dedicated to explore, discover, recover, conserve and research about the Titanic), it has dived six more times recovering more than a considerable number of objects, huge pieces of history.
In some point of the exclusive press tour I came across with Lowell Lytle, actor in charge to performing the role of the famous Titanic's Capitan, Edward John Smith; a privileged eleven year project that has given him the opportunity to travel around the world and see with his own eyes the Titanic itself.
"(…) It was not a movie, it was the real thing. I couldn't believe it but I was there. I can tell you, no one can see the Titanic with their own eyes and not be changed, it was a wonderful experience", commented Lytle in an exclusive interview with Qué Pasa! TV.
In the middle of the exhibition the spirits are tense and I don't know if it was my imagination but, while entering the room in which the objects begin to narrate the ship collision against the iceberg, I began to feel colder.
The surprise came when I saw a big piece of ice in the back of a gigantic room, pretty dark and full of the sounds of the cold ice of the North Atlantic -which in fact, I discovered after a while, was added into the room to give it a dramatic touch-. But that's not all; people can touch the ice block and even participate in the challenge leaving the hand over the ice for more than 15 seconds, to find out what it was like to be submerged in the ice waters of the Atlantic. It can sound a little disturbing but in fact is a moving experience.
The adventure continues until the end of the exhibition, when people arrive at the passengers list in which we found the name of the survivors and the deceased's. Nervous I approached the list discovering that unfortunately neither Julius, nor his wife, or any other member of his family or friends was one of the 705 lucky people that survived.
Even when my character results not to be a lucky one, the entire exhibition, the nervousness that causes, the whole experience to be there was unique and results a perfect way to enjoy a moment of amusement.
Others exhibitions from the RMS Titanic Inc. has been showed in Japan, Mexico, Sweden, England, France, Norway, Canada, Argentina, Germany, Switzerland, China and several estates from America. Today the organization have seven additional exhibitions in Dublin and New York to mention a few. For more information call 787 756 8174 or 787 765 6239.
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