Many people visit museums when they travel to new places. Why do you think people visit museums? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

A museum is a place where objects cultural, historic, scientific and artistic value are stored.
Hence the most important part of any city is its museum. I agree with the author that most people make sure that they visit museum whenever they travel to a new place. In my opinion, the reasons as to why people visit museums are explored below.

Firstly, the best way to know about something or someplace is to begin from the past. What else captures the past better than a museum? For example: - I have visited the Chandigarh city museum twice in my life. This museums houses the artifacts and relics of the ancient Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro civilizations. Artifacts include idols of gods and goddesses, pottery, wheels, tools used for irrigation, farming and threshing the grain. These tools provide a valuable insight into the fact that the land of Chandigarh, once was a center of booming trade, agriculture. Also ,the idols lets us have a peek into the past religious activities. The skeletons from the Indus valley civilization era, also housed in this museum, highlights an intriguing mystery relating the sudden fall of this ancient, well-planned city.

Secondly, a museum houses the crafts and other works by artists of both the contemporary society and from within the past 100 years. A tourist will get a birds-eye view of the different art forms prevalent in that place. Besides housing artistic works, many museums organize short documentary movies that act as a source of enlightenment regarding the lifestyle and art. For example- The Vadodara city museum in the Gujarat State, showcases the very lifestyle and different forms of livelihood for the original denizens of Kutch salt desert. Also a five minute documentary video is shown to the visitors in 3 different languages, that are, Gujarati, Hindi and English.

Finally, one must not forget that it is not possible to understand the customs of a place in just a few days. One can only understand it if he gets the stay in that place for many years. Tourists normally stay for a maximum period of a week. It is possible to get an idea of the culture of a place only through a museum. For instance, government in India, have started organizing programmes in the local museums where artists perform and these artists summarize the customs, traditions of the place either in dance forms or in the form of a song.

Thus to conclude, tourists visit museums of the place they are visiting since these places captured the artistic, cultural, historic essence of the people .