Maritime Culture Centre in Gdansk

While I take my time to get through all the pictures I took during the two trips and choose the ones I want to share with you, I’m going to finally publish a few posts that I’ve been putting aside for quite some time now.

When I wrote my posts about Kniewo and Kaszuby that we visited during the long Mayweekend, I mentioned that we decided to postpone our trip for one day. Why? On Saturday, April 28^th, PolishMaritime Museumin Gdansk was opening its new department. Maritime Culture Centre. We decided that it was a good opportunity to go there and see it. Plus we wanted to visit the Old Town in Gdansk, which I like a lot but don’t go there too often. It’s usually way too crowded for me. Although I try to visit it for the Dominican Market (when it gets even more crowded than usually). 

However, we know that getting anywhere near the Old Town by car is not the smartest idea. That is why we took the SKM train (local train) from Gdynia to get there. You get off in Gdansk Glowny and take a walk through the Old Town to get to the tourist spots. It’s a short walk and I’ll describe that another time. This time I’m going to focus on the Museum itself. 

When we got to the Museum, the queue was really long. I expected that. After all,  I wasn’t the only one knowing about the big opening, was I? So we waited patiently to get to know that it was impossible for us to get to the interactive exhibit. I mean, theoretically it was possible. After 4 pm. We were there at noon. We decided it wasn’t worth it. We saw the exhibits that we were allowed to see. And left. Totally disappointed. I get it that it was the opening, so there were many people there. And I get it that the entrance was for free (but that’s not the reason why we went there. The tickets are cheap). And I get it that there can only be up to 50 people in the interactive room at once. What I don’t get, though, is the fact that people were entering the room and leaving after half an hour tops and for the rest of the hour the exhibit was almost empty! That was a total waste for people such us! We couldn’t wait for four hours just to get into that one room. And the rest of the Museum…? How to call it nicely… Totally not worth it. I’ve been to other departments of the Polish Maritime Museum and they are much better than this one. I totally don’t get all the fuss. It’s probably all due to the interactive exhibit. But the situation that we had might as well happen during the high season. The Centre is located right by the Motlawa River, next to one of Gdansk’s most famous symbols – the Crane. So there are so many tourists there. Well, we’ll see how it’s going to function during the high season. 

For us it was a beautiful, sunny day and a wonderful walk around the Old Town. And that’s how we want to remember that day.

 That was probably the best thing in the Museum. If you pushed the button, a specific stinky smell was pushed at you so that you could guess what the stink was (from the things that you can find on old ships)