The One And Only PIG MUSEUM Of The World !

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Follow me to a museum which is truly unique in all aspects, namely the one and only Pig Museum world-wide. "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us, only pigs treat us as equals." (Winston Churchill) Private collector Erika Wilhelmer found a home for her collection of pigs and pig related paraphernalia which couldn't be more appropriate: the art deco building formerly used for the administration of the slaughterhouse (German: Schlachthof) in Stuttgart, Schlachthofstraße 2 (Slaughter House Street). The ambience couldn't be better. The ground floor is the more serious one so-to-speak, lots of information is waiting to be looked at and read. Loud grunts come out of a loudspeaker. On the walls hang photos with hundreds of black frames of extinct or endangered pig breeds. You also meet the 'German Large White' on a rotating stage, the flagship of the international pig industry so-to-speak. A variety of jobs based on pigs is introduced such as hunter, breeder, butcher, medical researcher, salesman. Walking on we learn that the pig is the animal best adapted for engrafts. Valves from pigs' hearts can be transplanted into humans. 'The Global Pig' gives information about breeding pigs worldwide. The Chinese have 490 million pigs and with this nearly half of all the pigs of the world. In Afghanistan there is only one pig. More pigs than people live in Denmark. The Spaniards eat more pork than the Germans. Up the staircase to the second floor. The whole museum is bilingual, all explanations are given in German and English. There are more pig/swine/sow/hog related expressions in German than in English, so not everything can be translated literally. German terms are positive as well as negative. 'Sow' can be put in front of nouns and adjectives in colloquial speech. In the south of Germany 'sow-good' is an extremely positive adjective, only topped by 'sow-smooth'. 'Sow-weather' is negative all over the country. If you want to express your deep felt sympathy with someone's plight, you can address them as, "You poor pig". What the visitor finds on the first floor makes the mind boggle. Kitsch in its purest form! In one room stand several glass containers in which you can find hundreds of pigs of all sizes and materials sorted by colour. In another room pigs are sorted by material. Then the huge collection of piggy-banks from all over the world! Show-cases in the corridor contain a pig orchestra made of fine porcelain or figurines and paintings showing pigs in the rôle of famous art characters (the Mona Lisa!), mythological pigs, Balinese pig masks, pig dolls in traditional ethnic costumes, pig couples in gondolas on the Grand Canal in Venice, pigs as decoration on kitchen utensils, pig families on the beach and, and, and. "There is no such thing which cannot be transformed into the shape of a pig." And then there is the small room with dark red walls. A large painting in fifty shades of pink (!) shows a voluptuous sow in sexy lingerie lolling on a sofa, one of her gigantic buttocks curving towards the onlooker's eye. "Pigs are very beautiful animals...There is no point of view from which a really corpulent pig is not full of sumptuous and satisfying curves." G.K. Chesterton How many exhibits are there at all? I've found different numbers on the net: 30.000, 37.000 and 42.000. The ticket sales woman even said 46.000. Who cares? In any case every visitor will find enough to amuse themselves. Recommended. Oink. Oink.