My Favorite Museums

Well, it's been almost four weeks since I completed my internship in Pitt's Study Abroad Office, and I really honestly miss the place, the people, everything about working there. There are few places where it's not only possible, but acceptable to spend an afternoon discussing, debating, and ranking the best museums in the world. In consideration of things like diversity and coherence of the collection, food, manageability and location, here are the museums that I advocated for:

Dylan's TOP 5 Museums

1. Leopold Museum in Vienna 
2. Philadelphia Art Museum
3. Imperial War Museum in London
4. Museu Nacional de Catalunya (MNAC) in Barcelona
5. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City 

At the Tate Modern during my first trip to London

Honorable Mention:

Art museums like the Uffizi in Florence and the Louvre in Paris are indisputably some of the best in the world - yet for someone like me, who appreciates art but can't necessarily ingest/comprehend such enormous collections, they're just not manageable.

On the other hand, some of the museums that I have visited have been randomly fun and interesting but a bit too specific to make my list: these would be museums like the Museum of Childhood in London or the Museum of Hash, Marijuana, and Hemp in Amsterdam.

The museum that was the most unexpected success for me was the National Gallery at Veletrzni Palace in Prague. I'd definitely like to throw an honorable mention their way. 

Obviously there were many diverse museums to visit when I was living in London: the Freud Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Tate Modern and the National Gallery. In Provence curiosity pulled me into the Museum of Natural Science in Aix-en-Provence and even the Camargue Rice Museum. And because Pitt subsidizes the arts in Pittsburgh, students have free admission to all sorts of interesting museums - the Carnegie Museums, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Mattress Factory...

But at the end of the day, my Top 5 are untouched by any of the museums that I have seen (so far). My coworkers gave me some recommendations that they hope will challenge my Top 5. Their favorites are the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the National Portraiture Gallery in Washington, DC and the Museo de la Memoria in Rosario, Argentina (a museum of political dictatorship and the dirty war). We'll just see about that! And hopefully soon, I feel that travel bug itching to have its way...