Titanic Exhibit @ Royal BC Museum

For our reception at FOSS4G 2007 we have rented several galleries at the Royal BC Museum, for a stand-up reception amongst the exhibits. Should be very cool.

The Museum is currently hosting a “special traveling exhibit” of artifacts from the Titanic, but the cost of renting the Titanic gallery was exorbitant (more than the rest of the galleries put together), so we did not rent it. Thank goodness!

This weekend was rainy, so I took my daughter to the Museum on Sunday, and the price of getting in included the Titanic exhibit. So in we went. In fairness to the exhibitors, they did their best with what they had to work with. But let’s remember what those things are: artifacts just 100 years old, and pretty ordinary; the limited selection of things they could drag up from 2 miles under the ocean that had not been completely pulped by time.

“Wow, what an attractive chamber pot.” “Goodness, who knew they had taps back then.” “Hm, a bottle full of an unknown fluid.”

If you want a visceral experience of the Titanic… watch James Cameron’s blockbuster movie. There is also an IMAX movie with underwater shots of the wreck showing at the theater attached to the Museum, which might be a bit more impressive.

While the Titanic exhibit is garnering all the hoopla, upstairs in the First Nations gallery is where the really good stuff is (we’ve got that one rented)! 100 year old totem poles, exquisite art, great historical presentation. And, especially good right now, they have the Dundas collection of Tsimshian art, collected 150 years ago. Really magnificent stuff, very museum-worthy and worth seeing. Sadly, the Dundas is also a traveling exhibit, and by the time FOSS4G rolls into town it will have already moved on.