30seconds.blogs.com: Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zürich

David and I took the train to enjoy a 7-hour date yesterday in downtown Zurich, seeing mostly things we'd never seen before, and in some cases, had no idea existed. We had never visited any museums in Zürich. Well, there's no time like the present.

First stop: Schweizerisches Landesmuseum. That's a tough one to type. It's a collection of items relating to Swiss history. For example:

- an 800-year old embroidered tablecloth, flax on canvas
- a wooden
Palm Sunday donkey with Jesus figure astride, from 1055 AD
- delicate, ornate drinking glasses from 1650 - how did they preserve such fine, thin glass all that time without breaking it??
-
Swiss Reformer Zwingli's sword & helmet (with a hole in it... he died in 1531 in the 2nd Battle of Kappel, 10 minutes from our home here)
- a huge collection of knives, ranging from the Neolithic Age, through the Bronze Age and on up to the present. A couple of intriguing highlights:

• a mushrooming knife
• one for castrating boars
• an Austrian knife with a purple handle
• a knife for roast chestnuts
• Swiss army knives from 1891 on
• 4 "plagiarized copies of the Swiss army knife" (goodness!)
• Army knives from Germany, USA, Netherlands, Denmark, Malaysia (camouflage pattern!)
• a parachutist's knife
• NATO knife, NASA knife
• knives signed by Presidents Reagan and Bush
• a Nepalese machete-type tool (called a "Kukri")
• a diamond-encrusted, platinum and gold knife
• an ostrich feather trimming knife (doesn't everyone need one of those?)

We were pleasantly interested in the collection for exactly one hour, then it was clearly time to have lunch as hunger conquered any more attention we might have otherwise offered.

We were not allowed to take photos inside this museum, but David got some nice shots of the outside of the structure: