A week in Ghost Town

I have discovered that Rexburg, which I have always considered a quiet town without much going on, is even more quiet and boring during college breaks. This town caters to the college, and while the students are gone...there is nothing going on. So Tyler and I have had to be creative to keep ourselves entertained. And we have a lot of time we need to fill up because I'm still in the process of getting a job, and Tyler only works part-time.

One thing that Tyler and I have been talking about doing for a while is going to the Museum of Idaho in Idaho Falls. From March to September they have a Titanic Exhibit, and I really, really, really wanted to see it. My sister went to one a few years back and said it was really fantastic. So, since we need things to do, Tyler and I took the time this last week to go see the exhibit.


This is a picture from the outside of the museum. They wouldn't let us take pictures inside, which was a bit of a bummer, but oh well.


You can see that Tyler was just as excited as I was to see the exhibit ;p Actually I think I snapped the picture while he was in the middle of saying something...


The exhibit was very informative. When you first walk in, they give each person a boarding pass, and you become a person from the Titanic. It gives the person's name, what class they were in (Tyler and I were both first class passengers), who they were traveling with, why they were traveling, and a few other little background things like where they are from.

Then you walk around looking at things that were uncovered from the Titanic, along with the underwater picture of the item before it was brought up. There was a model of the Titanic...that ship was huge! They talked about the design, who came up with it, how long it took to build and what sort of effort was put into it.

Then you learn about some more passengers and learn about the first day on board, look at what it would be like to be a first class passenger as opposed to a second or third class passenger. They had a menu for the different classes, and there were probably twice as many choices for the first class passengers as for the other two classes. And all the items on the first class menu were written in French...I guess to make them seem more exotic???

Then of course they talk about the fateful day, the size of the iceberg, how it hit the ship, how many people died. They even had a huge block of ice you could put your hand on to feel how cold the water would have been. It was super cold! At the very end you got to look at a list of the passengers who lived and died and see if you were a survivor or not. Tyler and his wife survived. I was a male too...weird...and I didn't survive, but my wife did.

It was really a fascinating exhibit, very informative, and sad...of course. And it put me in the mood to go home and watch the movie. I'm really glad we could go, and if that exhibit ever comes back, I will be there!

Another fun thing Tyler and I did with our time this week was a game night. Tyler and I don't exactly agree on the same games, so we had to both sacrifice a bit, but it was a lot of fun. I love to play Phase Ten, so we played that. And then Tyler taught me how to play poker. Thank goodness it wasn't for real, I'm horrible at it!!!

After the games, we did a Tim Tam Slam. For any Americans who have never heard of such a thing, it's not some sort of Sumo wrestling tournament, and no spouses were harmed in the making of this activity. A Tim Tam is a cookie. They have them in Australia and New Zealand, and I recently learned they are a big thing in Taiwan as well.

Anyway, it's hard to explain, but there are layers in the cookie of actually crunchy cookie and soft chocolaty stuff. Tyler says he would compare it to a chocolate Milano covered with chocolate and with a different kind of chocolate in the middle...if that makes sense.

A Tim Tam Slam is when you try to use your cookie as a straw to suck a hot drink through for as long as possible before the whole thing melts and collapses. The best is if you have Milo, but we just used Hot Chocolate, since Milo is hard to find here. So you bite off opposite corners of the cookie, put one corner in your drink, and suck through the other end like crazy! Here are some pictures to maybe help you visualize...sorry, I'm no good at explaining!

So here Tyler is sucking like crazy. lol. And you can see the package of Tim Tams in the corner.


And there I am...sucking away. Mine completely melted and fell into the cup. I kept finding little chunks of cookie when I was drinking my hot chocolate.


This was Tyler's first Tim Tam Slam and I think he liked it.

Alright, one last fun thing we did this week, to help break up the monotony of life in Rexburg during the ghost town break, was to go to a drive in movie! It's something neither of us had done for a while...I hadn't been since I was a kid. Originally we chose to go because we had a coupon for a free admission, but when we got there they said the coupon wouldn't work because there was new management now. Still, it was worth the extra $5 to see two movies.

We saw Transformers 2 and The Proposal. I don't want to poison any one's desire to see the movies, so I won't say much (I'm pretty critical of movies) but it sounds like a lot of people feel that the second Transformers movie wasn't as good as the first. I haven't seen the first, but I sure found the second one long and boring. I kept looking at the clock and wondering when the movie would end. Two and a half hours later...it was finally over. The Proposal was kinda funny. It had the usual slew of sexual references and the normal predictable ending, but they did a few things to shake up the predictableness, and I appreciated that.

That's me waiting for the movie to begin. I tried to take a picture of Tyler, but he kept turning his head away. What a spoil sport!

All in all, we've been pretty successful at entertaining ourselves this week. Here's hoping next week brings more fun, more excitement...and a job!