The Museum Night

one of the many neons @ Neon Muzeum on Mińska 25 (SOHO Factory)

It all probably started in 2009 when I was still in high school and had additional English classes in the evening. I was preparing myself for the CAE exam and once in a while had classes with native speakers from the US. I could dwell upon how it makes no sense to let the Americans prepare students for a British exam only because here and there English is the official language but that's not the point here. One the native speakers I was lucky to meet was Randall. A really charming guy, giving his best during every class and even organizing in-class court trials so that we could practice Legal English. He was a sort of a polymath as he was interested in so many things that every class was a real pleasure and definitely no stress even if I had trouble understanding his American accent at first.

Randall put us all to shame once. He asked if we had known what had happened the previous weekend. None of us had a clue. My hometown is a small city and nothing big really happens there, few people go to museums (even though the entry fee is dirt cheap compared to some museums in Warsaw) and there's not so much to do in terms of sophisticated entertainment. No wonder nothing seemed attractive in this city for a group of teenagers whose main problem was usually balancing between social life and school. Coming back to the main topic, we had no slightest idea that in a city like this there might had been something so attractive for a foreigner (especially an Uncle Sam foreigner) that he absolutely needed to share the story with us. That's how I heard about the Museum Night. Well, maybe it wasn't the first time I heard the phrase cause it rang a bell back then. I just had no clue my small city could participate in such event. After all, what was here to see?. That's what I thought. 

Anyway, Randall kept asking how often did we go to museums, theaters and galleries and this put us to even more shame cause the struggle not to say 'never' had never been so real before. And finding excuses why we prefer our cozy share meters over art and culture wasn't easy either. After all, what were we to say? That we find our city just a tiny hole on a map of Poland? Or that the whole country laughs at us and it always feels a bit awkward to say we come from this particular city? Or maybe we should had claimed our ignorance and laziness? Well, that wouldn't be sophisticated and would deprive us of the high-brow intelligence and the membership of the educated class we all aspire to. 

So what did we do? From what I can recall, we just pretended to be surprised that our city has so much to offer. The grass is greener on the other side, you know. 

In time, the Museum Night became a serious event, broadly debated in the media and I remember dreaming that when I finally move to Warsaw, I'm gonna go to as many museums as I can and live this life I used to read about in books. So I moved to Warsaw and lived in my beautiful apartment surrounded by people who care more about their BMWs and Vuittons and clearly have little to do with art or culture. Money can't make you sensitive, sorry not sorry. That's why year after year you could find me sitting on the sofa, killing time with the silver screen and watching headlines, laughing a bit at all those who queue for a free entrance to museums and other cultural institutions. Why can't they just go on a regular day, pay a few zlotys and admire art? - that's exactly what I had in mind. 

Everything changed last year when we decided to take part in the Museum Night completely on a whim. We had a plan and a list of places on the bucket list but hadn't predicted such huge interest. In the end we didn't manage to visit everything we wanted and the weather put in its pennyworth. But I remember we went to the synagogue in Twarda Str. and it was so funny to see people understand that the Jews aren't just a mystical notion nobody has ever seen because there secretly hiding in their meeting places. And some people's faces when they found Christianity stems from Judaism and the Torah has some scriptures found in the Old Testament were just priceless. It's a pity the Synagogue didn't participate in the Museum Night yesterday. 

Never mind the synagogue, yesterday we visited so many places that we were sort of taken aback to find that we've hardly crossed the magical number of 13.000 steps per day (I know the original number is 10.000 but I am more than that hence 13.000). From the Neon Museum, through the Church of the Holy Cross, the Fibak Gallery (with portraits of famous Jews), the Staszic Palace, the SDA Church (with over 60 translations of the Bible and some old scriptures) to the Museum of the Evolution, we spent almost 4 hours walking and adding new places on our bucket list for the next Museum Night. Seeing people coming with their whole families to such places was really inspiring. Maybe there's still some hope for the nation and we won't turn out to be a bunch of grown up ignorants. But what made me sad at the same time is that many people still have little idea of what they see for example in the Museum of Evolution. They just show their kids skeletons (most of them aren't real and I hope one day this place turns out to be a big interactive space like the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising for instance) and don't even try to explain them what they see. In the Neon Museum I saw many hipster kids constantly snapping, without even knowing why neons are so important and why would someone devote a whole museum to something so banal. 

But that's just the world we live in. In the eara of pictures, icons and everything accessible, vivising a museum is like a culture clash for the youth. It's a sad picture but on the other hand, even if some visit museums just because once in a year it's free and the fee can be saved for a donut and a paper mug from Starbucks, it gives me some hope that maybe people still like museums and art galleries. And not to sound so pessimistic in the end, I encourage all of you to grab your asses next year and make the Museum Night the opportunity to go somewhere you would never go otherwise. It's all worth it even in the rain.