Quai Branly Museum - it does not address is the official name of the museum of primitive art of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.

But the address, of course. Opened in 2006 on the initiative of French President Jacques Chirac, was fond of ethnography, museum really is on the Quai Branly, a few steps from the Eiffel Tower. Walk past is impossible - it is visible from afar: a huge mirror walls and windows, all covered with green. Mosses, flowers and vines. This is the famous Patrick Blanc vertical garden. On the wall mounted metal frame on it - the layers of polyamide, support plant roots, through the capillaries flows downward nutrient solution. Blanc, cheerful man with green hair, promotes vertical gardens all over the world, Branly Museum - one of his most famous projects. In winter, the wind from the Seine sometimes damages the plant, but in the rest of the year looks fantastic wall.

That part of the building that is not occupied by greenery, is no less surprising: it is colorful (mostly red-purple color), on stilts, and the sides bulge parallelepipeds of different sizes. The building designed by the famous French architect Jean Nouvel, and the garden in which it is located, - landscaper Gilles Clement. From waterfront garden separates the glass wall - 200 meters long and 9 in height. For it is possible to come and free to walk among the ponds and hills, breathe in the fragrance of exotic flowers, and to feel a little bit in the jungle.

It is strange to recall that there is another and the actual museum. But it is worth a look, although 300 thousand exhibits on display only 3500 (a change of thought in the next few years). Masks, figurines, tom-toms, tambourines, drums, carpets, skins, tomahawks - all located in the hall without explanation and tablets, at first glance, even haphazard. The meaning of the "unsystematic" clear - looking at the artifacts of a foreign culture, the visitor inevitably begins to reflect, compare, think. However, on a collection of mummified heads of Maori warriors he did not think - Branly museum had triumphantly return 20 tattooed heads to New Zealand, the government demanded that long ago, Europeans exported the objects of national culture.

The museum has a multimedia library, a theater and a restaurant overlooking the River Seine and the Eiffel Tower, where stunned tourists can finally recover.