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Yelp
The 'In Flanders Fields' museum was the highlight of my trip to Belgium. The whole town of Ypres is wonderful, but the Mennin Gate and the In Flanders Fields museum are particularly thought-provoking and powerful.
The museum itself is one of the best museums I've ever visited. I'm not even that interested in wars and all things like that, but I found it to be well-laid out and powerful. The museum is sitauted inside the old cloth building, which has been rebuilt to show the amount of damage - so there are bullet holes throughout. Inside, the museum isn't very big but it's well organised. Visitors are given a card containing the name of someone who was in WWI and throughout the museum there are boxes in which people can check up on how their characters are doing.
The museum is designed to invoke a reaction. Throughout, it uses a powerful mixture of noise, films, images and words to convey the emotions of the time there are letters from soldiers saying sad things like I blew off a soldiers head today, got a bit of blood on my shirt which was a pain. It's saddening. Periodically, there are gunshots and bomb blasts overhead, for added effect.
At the end of the trail in the museum there's a giftshop. They seem to have a Poppy theme throughout it, and lots of items displaying the poppies and the famous 'In Flanders Fields' poem.