Our Favorite Museums Around the World

We’ve had a lot of free time to explore the food, style, and culture in cities around the world. And without a doubt, someone always recommends us to visit a museum wherever we are. Sometimes we do, but more often we don’t. At this point, many of the museums we’ve visited kind of just blur together. It’s not that we don’t enjoy them, it’s just that we are a couple of people who seek the unique and unexpected, and a building full of old paintings — no matter how historic and beautiful — doesn’t satisfy that desire.

But this post is about the BEST museums we’ve been to. We have an eclectic taste, so keep in mind this might not feel like any list you’ve seen before. Behold, the weird and the wonderful:

An installation at the MONA Museum in Tasmania.

Museum of Old and New Art - Launceston, Tasmania
The name didn’t excite us at first, but our friend was adamant that we visit (so we did)! This place is pretty unique just for the architecture. It’s built into the bedrock with exposed groundwater still flowing throughout the museum. Then, just when you think you are safe, the restaurant juts out over the bay, so you feel like you are floating on a dock. But the real win is the amount of interactive installations this place houses. You can see your heartbeat reflected in a hundred lightbulbs, you can walk through a small opening in the side of a wall and feel like you are strolling inside of a cloud the size of a football field, and you can stand waist deep between recycled oil without getting dirty and see the clouds above drift in the reflection. It’s hard to explain, but so amazing.
Palais de Tokyo - Paris, France
This is the first and only museum we’ve been asked to perform a dance move as admission (on top of actually paying for admission). When a friend recommended that we go here, we didn’t even look it up. In a city full of history, we were pleasantly surprised by the variety of performance art in this unique space. Examples include a pitch black room where a choreographed dance was occurring, a room where you didn’t know who was a performer and who was an observer, and a child walking into a gallery and unexpectantly performing some sort of monologue in French.
Vasa Museum - Stockholm, Sweden
Have you ever heard of a king’s ship sinking in the harbor on its maiden voyage? That’s exactly what the Vasa did in 1628. The ship is beautiful and incredibly ornate with three rows of cannons. Most thought it was gone forever, but the mix of seawater and fresh water where it sank kept it so well preserved that it was excavated 333 years later and an entire museum was built around it in the subtle ship-like Scandinavian design.
Gold Museum (Museo del Oro) - Bogotá, Colombia
Find the secret tribal room. That’s all we’re going to say.
New Museum - New York, New York
There are multiple floors in this space. Some of them are meh, but some of them are mind blowing. Most likely you’ll want to go straight to floor two and three. Our favorite was an exhibit you walked through and felt like you were on the inside of someone’s thoughts — literally. OK we know this sounds a little crazy but it was kind of like Meow Wolf and we don’t want to give all the surprises away.

There are many more museums we visited that impressed us throughout our travels, but these are our top picks, for sure. Buuuut just to be on the safe side, we’ve got a couple of honorable mentions, too:

Viking Ship Museum - Oslo, Norway. A few old viking ships that were used in burial ceremonies.
Centre Pompidou - Paris, France. A more unique take on modern art.
Maasai Cultural Museum - Arusha, Tanzania. A very low funded but highly fascinating representation on what Maasai life is like using life size paper mache figures.
The National WWII Museum - New Orleans, Louisiana. We don’t usually get into wartime museums, but this one was so well done!
The Walker Art Center - Minneapolis, Minnesota. Not only because of hometown pride, but one of the best sculpture gardens we’ve ever seen.