Národní muzeum

I went to the National Museum yesterday afternoon. That was an experience and a half..! The building is from the late 19th century, built - I believe - speficially for the collections. It's amazing, both inside and out (as you can see from the pictures), although in all honestly the architecture and decoration ended up being far more interesting to me than the actual collections.

Don't get me wrong - I'm definitely a 'museum person', and will tend to visit a museum just for the sheer cultural experience even if I'm not completely interested in the theme(s) of the collections. However, before I went, someone at the school had described it as "a building with an endless collection of rocks". Indeed, the Minerology Dept does take up an entire wing of this quite large building. And I did, as he predicted, end up walking through an interminable series of large rooms inhabited by glass cabinet after glass cabinet of what must've been every mineral ever discovered - with [sometimes multiple] examples of every possible variant in crystalline structure. That, my friends, is a lot of rocks!

There's also the Paleontological Dept, which gave me a twinge of nostalgia for the Museum of the Earth - and Sarah - back in Ithaca. And of course we all know that the best Mastodon skeleton in the world is in Ithaca! Between the two, the Národní muzeum's collection of fossils dwarfs the MotE's, but the MotE is definitely geared better for leaving with a sense of "I learned something here" (and yes, the info cards here were Czech/English, so that's not a factor).

I breezed through the Anthropological and Zoological Depts and outright skipped some other departments (after nearly two hours of rocks and bones I was quite ready for a rest), but on my way out wandered through the temporary exhibition called "...A přijely tanky" ("..and the tanks arrived") which was, in part, a photogallery of the 1968 Warsaw-Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. There was also a tank parked in front of the museum as well. Information in English was hard to come by here, because there were a lot of newspaper clippings and postcards/letters on display.. and that would've been a monumental job to translate. But still, the emotional turmoil didn't really need words.

After leaving the museum, I went home and took a nap.



Images stolen from the Wikipedia entry: National Museum (Prague).