A friend and I recently went to The Bodies Exhibit in Winnipeg, and this is my (our) review and personal experience, and personal opinion of what we saw.
Overall we were left rather underwhelmed. We weren’t sure what exactly to expect, other than hearing verbal reviews from people that had already been.
Our first impressions were less than great. The lobby was extremely disorganized, and poorly set up, with no signage instructing people where to line up to buy tickets or how to enter. Nor is the entrance/lobby area very large for the size of exhibit, or the number of people they have wait before allowing entry. Instead of a well set up entry and ticket lobby, there was a rather unkept man wearing a well-worn old blazer barking at people, telling them where to go to buy tickets or get in line. I saw this guy physically and aggressively grab a man’s arm that was confused about where he was to go, and pulled on him so hard that he nearly fell over, he had to hop on one foot several times to regain his balance so he didn’t fall to the ground. He politely laughed it off, but it was completely uncalled for.
The woman holding peope back from the entrance once you had tickets was…what can I say, to be extremely polite, “rough around the edges”. She apparently thought she was being amusing by harrassing me about not looking and sounding excited enough about being there, and didn’t seem to want to let it go. She practically insisted that everyone had to have their pictures taken in front of a green screen before entry, “Just for fun”, as she put it. And she made no offer to present this as an option. We felt it was presented in a rather bullying way, and the average person simply went along with it. They were obviously planning to make the attempt to sell them at the end of your tour as a souvenir in the gift shop. We pointed out we had no intension of having our pictures taken, and her and the “photographer” seemed rather shocked we didn’t want this “experience”.
Once we entered the exhibit, there was, I suppose, a reasonable number of displays, ranging from full bodies in various stages of dissection, to individual organs and body parts. We were surprised that the body parts and internal organs all appeared to be very dry and extremely pale. For some reason we both expected the preserved orgams and exposed tissues to be preserved and displayed in a glossy looking fashion, so as to appear more realistic, and more pink and red. In fact all the orgams and body parts were very dry, matt, and pale, in the realm of shades of white, grey and beige, making most everything to appear like plastic and latex models. I can only assume all the displays on exhibit are real bodies and body parts, but since everything is so pale and processed they completely appear as models, so there is little risk of being shocked or feeling sick by what you see, as nothing appears as realistic as you would imagine when you hear about this exhibit.
Personally, we felt that some of the employees were less than professional while we were there. The tickets were roughly $20, which seemed a bit steep for what we took in. Overall, we were not as impressed as we had hoped to be.
5/10
