My trip to the Coffee Museum!
Today is a good day, we have coffee and museum in the same title! The Coffee Museum is located in Villa 44 in the Al Fahidi Historical Neighborhood, in Dubai, and as you might guess it's a museum about coffee. The Coffee Museum is supposed to be a relaxed environment where people can come learn a bit about coffee and maybe even have a taste while you're there. The building it’s located in is not all that big but there are two floors and also only so much that can be said about coffee, so it works out in the end. The first floor has six "rooms" the entrance and gift shop, the Majlis (seating area), Coffee Origins showroom, Middle Eastern antiques showroom, and two International Antiques showrooms — one for older more primitive campfire stuff and one more modern coffee grinders and such. The second floor has the restrooms, two offices, the pantry, the cafe, the media room, the History of Coffee showroom, the Coffee in Literature showroom, and the kids corner which I'm not gonna lie, looked like it would be kinda lame.
The building is made in such a way that there is supposed to be a main entrance where you would walk in and get a ticket and then there is a second entrance/exit where the gift shop is that I imagine you are meant to exit through. However when we went the "main" entrance was closed, boarded up and covered by giant coffee pots on display, so I guess they don't like having two entrances. So we entered from the gift shop entrance and were met by a nice man who told us tickets were ten dirhams each but if we held on to our tickets then we could get a free drink at the end, so at the end of the day no money is lost.
So the first thing you see when you enter is the majlis or traditional sitting area with some decorative pots and the option to sit down and be served some Arabic style coffee. Behind you is the more modern international antiques room which is where we went first. Then we went to the coffee origins room, the older international antiques room, and finally the middle eastern antiques room. All the rooms basically just had a bunch of coffee machines and tools on a table in the middle of the room with some informational signs, and then coffee bags lining the walls. One of my favorite things in these rooms was in the modern international antiques where they had a coffee grinder made in Germany using melted bullet shells, in the aftermath of WWII, which was pretty cool.
The second floor had less to offer but what it had I thought was potentially more interesting than the first floor. As I mentioned before half of the rooms are administrative stuff and there are only two rooms that have displays, although they are pretty big. So the first we went into was the history room which also houses the kids corner, and it was pretty cool. As y'all know by now, history is my favorite, so a room in a museum talking about the history of coffee is basically the pinnacle of what mankind can accomplish.
The second and last room that we went into was the literature room which next to the history room was probably my favorite. There were (as you might imagine) a bunch of books talking about coffee which I thought was fun because some of them were kinda quirky and interesting. Then there were also a bunch of graphs and informational stuff, like documents talking about scientific studies of coffee, with interesting health charts and all sorts of stuff like that. My favorite thing from this floor was in the literature room and it was this big map of the world with most of the countries named by what their word for coffee was.
After we were done getting educated we strolled over to the dimly lit cafe where they had a menu of almost every kind of coffee beverage you can think of as well as a few other things like fizzy drinks and snacks. So we turned in our tickets and as promised, got ten dirhams off whatever drink we ordered then went on our way.
All in all it's no surprise that I really like the Coffee Museum, it wasn't much of a muchness but what it did have to offer was fun and interesting. So as I always say go check it out yourselves, in our case it was about an hour in and out so nothing too time consuming. Anyway hope y'all enjoyed and see you next post.