Cairo - Day Two: Museum of Antiquities

April 19th, 2008

Today was entirely spent at the museum, and then after the museum we ate lunch at La Pacha, where I decided that I love Egyptian food and could quite easily be a vegetarian here. Again.

It's hard to write about the museum as an emotional experience because it wasn't - it was almost purely intellectual. I loved finding and identifying the gods in all of their depictions, loved seeing the giant scarab pushing the sun across the sky in the cartouches...but at the end of the day I think these things lose their majesty when they are taken out of their context and put cheek by jowl next to one another in a gloomy long hall.

I learned that the white birds I'd admired yesterday so much are egrets - that Egypt no longer has any native ibis but the egret look very similar. Our egyptologist told us that recently they've found a cemetary of embalmed ibis - more than a half-million of them!! They are the embodiment of the god Thoth - it's a shame they can no longer be found in this country.

The purple flowered trees are jacarandas, and the trees the egrets were roosting in yesterday evening are eucalyptus.

Driving to and from the hotel we passed many apartment buildings; their sides festooned with hanging wires and a/c units suspended like strange fruit among them - not mounted in the walls but hanging apart from them. Very strange.

In between these charmless socialized buildings could be found beautiful old manor homes, white and terracotta with wide balconies. After the revolution of the 1950's the country became a bit socialist, and many lovely old houses were torn down to make room for the subsistence towers. We passed young men practicing an ancient Egyptian art - archery - in the shade of the Cairo tower.

At the museum we saw an embarrassment of riches all stacked up and pinned under glass - alone they would have caused wonder - crammed together as they were they inspired little. I hate to say it but I was more moved by the Egyptian exhibit at the British Museum in London. There were some things though that you had to gasp at - the painting of geese that was more than 5,000 years old...the statue of Zhoser...Tutankhamun's jewelry...the strange shape of Ankhenaten (baby got back!)...and what I have seen has certainly excited me to visit all the temples - I want to see the PLACES I guess, rather than the things.

Have learned that one cannot trust travel books as far as one can throw them. Also, how to say thank you, no, and yes.

And now it is time to go lie by the pool.

(That evening we returned to the pool deck to patronize the shisha bar...)