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Yesterday I went to the Titanic exhibit with my friend Patricia. The exhibit was really fun. They have corridors and staterooms set up to look like first class, second class and steerage, lots of salvaged objects that belonged to passengers, fixtures and tools from the ship, and testimony from survivors on the audio tour. I was amazed by some of the salvage: postcards, playing cards and clothing! I didn't realize paper and cloth would survive 70 years in the ocean. The room about the sinking even has an "iceberg" that you can touch! A block of ice about 6 feet high and the length of the room.

There was a big model of the ship in the first room, and I confess I couldn't resist holding up my finger right next to the prow of the ship and squeaking "I'm king of the world!" Thankfully, there were no actual clips from the movie in the exhibit. Although they were selling copies of that big diamond necklace in the gift shop, as well as DVDs of the recent movie and an older one, also called Titanic, starring Barbara Stanwyck. I thought I had seen a really good older movie about the Titanic called The Longest Night, but I just looked it up on imdb.cm and that's something else entirely. So maybe the Barbara Stanwyck movie was the one I saw.

Instead of tickets you get a boarding pass with the name of an actual passenger on the back. At the very end is a list of everyone on the ship so you can find out whether your passenger survived. (The big wall chart of survivors also included the crew, which allowed you to compare the survival rates of first class, second class, steerage and crew. But I think the tickets all had the names of passengers.)

My card had Mrs. Samuel Herman, a second-class passenger from Somerset traveling with her entire family to visit her brother in New Jersey. She and her two daughters survived, but her husband and son died. Patricia's card had a first class passenger (I forget the name) who also lived. I wondered if everyone on the tickets survived, but then I heard some kids say their people had died.

The exhibit is at the Natural History Museum in Raleigh. I'd never been inside before, it was really interesting! They had displays of plants and animals native to NC (fun with taxidermy!), plus whale skeletons and lots of dinosaur bones too. They have the only known dinosaur heart! It's an iron deposit inside the chest cavity of a dinosaur skeleton. I guess the iron must be from the dinosaur's blood. The best part is, that dinosaur is named "Willo." Aww!

We had lunch at Cafe Luna, which was yum. I had a crab salad. It was simple -- just greens piled with fresh crabmeat and vinaigrette -- but really good and pretty filling. I was pretty tired by the end of the day (not just from the museum, but also because we couldn't remember which parking deck we were in and walked up to the 5th floor of the wrong one, then walked up to the 5th floor of the right one).