▶ Your Answer : It is of great worth to discuss whether or not visiting the museums in a foreign country is the most effective way to learn about the country. The answer to this question can be various depending on each individual's perspective. As far as I am concerned, I disagree with the given statement. First of all, the museums only deal with the past materials of a country, so the museums do not show current situations in the country. When tourists visit the museums, they just learn about the past state of a country, and it does not give them a chance to see how people in the country live today. The perfect example of this is the Korean War Museum. In particular, South Korea, where I was born and live now, was an extremely poor country at the time of the Korean War that broke out in 1950. At that time, most people were too poor to eat every single day. Besides, they even ate almost rotten foods or starved to death. The Korean War Museum exhibits clothes, houses, and foods that people consumed in the past. However, my country has rapidly developed over the last few decades, so that living standards have significantly improved and people in South Korea nowadays eat nutritious foods unlike before. It indicates that tourists who visit my country cannot learn about today's Korean culture from The Korean War Museum. Secondly, I think that the cultures of a country are more than the pragmatic remains and artifacts in the museums. It is obvious that the cultures are rather intangible and abstract, so people cannot learn about them from the museum. An experience I had last year is the epitome of this. I got to have a chance to visit Japan. Due to my interest which was developed from Japanese culture class last semester, I was excited to learn about the culture of Japan through real experience in Japan. In the middle of the trip, I visited the Tokyo National Museum. Naturally, I expected to see overall Japanese culture and I hoped that I could finally get a lot of information about Japan. However, unfortunately, the things that I saw in the museum were artifacts that were difficult to see as the cultures, such as rusty swords. To summarize what I mentioned above, I am against the notion that the best way to learn about the foreign culture is to visit the museums in the country since the museums shows only tangible remnants and past lifestyles of the country and I think there would be some better ways for people to learn about the foreign culture like living on a house with native people in the country as feeling their culture directly. (455words) |