Seven weird museums that pay homage to everything from toilets to watermelons
Whether it’s playing arcade games in New Hampshire or getting to customise your own cup noodle in Japan, these interactive museum exhibitions are worth a visit
Museums used to be fusty and dusty; one dimensional and dull. School trips to such places felt like punishment; you couldn’t touch anything and many of the uninspiring exhibits were labelled in esoteric, academic language that tested youthful attention spans.
Times change, though, and nowadays museums are almost duty bound to provide “hands-on”, “immersive” and “interactive” activities to attract visitors. Here are seven for the summer holidays, should you happen to be in the area, that combine learning with fun, quirkiness and tales of tragedy.
Cupnoodles Museum, Yokohama, Japan
An estimated 100 billion packages of instant ramen noodles are sold annually, according to no less an authority than the World Instant Noodles Association. And with such culinary domination (I use the word “culinary” loosely), it’s no surprise there’s a museum celebrating the humble snack in Japan, the country in which it originated.
Besides learning about the history of the college student’s standby, there’s a food court in which visitors can sample ramen from around the world, a noodle-themed children’s play area and, most popular of all, the opportunity to customise your own meal. Buy a cup from the vending machine, decorate it with the coloured markers provided, choose a soup base and toppings, then have staff seal and bag the concoction, and you’re good to go.
The museum is probably not the place to raise the subject of shelf life-extending ingredient tertiary-butyl hydroquinone (TBHQ), which allegedly has the potential to promote the formation of cancer. Employees would offer you a puzzled look and point out that Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles, ate them every day and lived to 96.