Titanic Museum

The Titanic Museum in Belfast is a remarkable and well-done modern display on a topic I care very little about.

The audio-visuals are exciting, poignant, accurate, detailed...whatever else they are supposed to be.  they get the information across in interesting and efficient manner. Who the men were who moved to Belfast to build the ships, and the neighborhoods they lived in? Immersion in the sounds and sights, photographs of the streets and the work areas, human-interest stories with direct quotes, descriptions of the hardships and dangers. Who were the women who were hired to work on the ships, what were they paid, how many signed up over and over to work other ocean journeys? All the stories of the designers, the politicians, the investors, the officers, it's all there, and you could do hours of it.  Yet it is laid out in a clear fashion so that you don't get lost in corners, bogged down in reading every little story next to a photo on the wall. You can take in only the main points at some stations and study in detail at others.

Unless, of course, you are married to a woman who finds every single one of these stories interesting, or at least feels obligated to read them all because it seems rather like a school assignment to complete the task in full, and that's just Who You Are. If you are that husband, you will daydream a fair bit off behind her, having absorbed the main points quickly at every stop. I assent to the idea that every person is important, and perhaps their story deserves to be told.  Yet not every person is interesting, and a long succession of stories only related by the fact that they ended in the same death or similar rescue isn't quite enough.

One of the last exhibits is the changes in safety rules on ships as a result of the disaster, such as requiring ships to have someone listening at all times (there was a ship nearby which could have helped with rescue, but had shut down communications for the night), and requiring binoculars on the observation platforms. It's the sort of thoroughness the whole museum shows.

The parking is good, the gift shop on the tolerable side of both the hokey and the rip-off scales, the two cafes are good, you can navigate around the place pretty easily, the guides are very knowledgeable and helpful. Great museum, really.  I wish all historical museums were this good.