[Surabaya Short Saturday] House of Sampoerna

Titing and I went to Surabaya for Supper Snapshots exhibition a couple of weeks ago and we stayed at Novi and Kak Ryza's house for the weekend.

On Saturday we had a short visit to House of Sampoerna, and it was my second time there. I still found the museum highly fascinating, and I really liked smelling the cloves, but the tobacco smells were really overwhelming. So again, I could only managed to stay half an hour inside the museum, feeling dizzy from the smell of tobacco.

house of sampoerna

House of Sampoerna is a former factory of Sampoerna turned into a museum that tells the story of the struggle of Sampoerna, a former cigarette worker who became the owner of Indonesia's most prominent cigarette company.

In this museum we can smell to various sorts of local tobacco leaves, and as the museum is still used by workers to make cigarettes during the day. So there's a strong aroma of tobacco in every corner of the museum.

And after 45 minutes, I got extremely nauseous from the tobacco smell.. just like what happened to me when going to the 2010 Ars Electronica in Linz, where the main art space was the former cigarette factory.

ps: this post is a part of the mwoatravels, a travel journal of maarten and i across java and bali in january-march 2012.