Day 12: Egyptian Museum (take 2) and the Nile - "Commandeer. We're going to commandeer that ship. Nautical term."

The Egyptian Museum and I just do not get along.  But more on that later.

This morning, after going to bed aroung 10:30 last night, we woke up before our alarm on our own for the first time all trip.  After taking it kind of slow and showering, we ate breakfast (the breakfast ladies gave us a warm welcome back, and it was nice to return to our usual toast, jam, and tea) and then finished blogging about our trip.  We then set out to try and see more of the Egyptian Museum than one little corner where I sat and recovered for a half-hour the first time we were there.

In front the Egyptian Museum, at least I made it through
this time.

Fortunately, we had a bit more success.  We walked through the places and skimmed the things we had already seen, and then we proceeded to see as much else as we could.  The problem is it is roughly organized.  Most rooms are grouped with things that all come from the same time period or ruler, but the museum doesn’t exactly flow.  In some places there are no descriptions on the pieces in the hallway, and in others the collections will jump from century to century.  At one point there was just a gold head plate that had covered a mummy in a glass case with no description sitting outside the Greco-Roman era room.  It didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Our felucca captain

 Anyway, we did get to see a variety of really old and cool things.  There’s ancient stuff from the Old Kingdom, including the Narmer Palette and giant statues.  There are interesting collections of pretty much every ancient artifact discovered: the coin room from the Greco-Roman era, animal mummies (huge crocodiles, baboons, cow, cat, dog, birds, etc), Nefertiti stuff, models of armies, chariots, bows, etc etc etc.  But most importantly, there were the mummies and the King Tutankhamen exhibit. I’ll describe each briefly.  The mummies: ancient and gross.  The King Tut: dude was rich.

The Nile

Ok now I’ll elaborate.  King Tut was really cool to see.  They had a variety of very large boxes that had enclosed his sarcophagus, and then his sarcophaguses (sarcophagi?), which were made of gold, and then the head plate that covered his mummy that evidently weighed 22 pounds (his innermost sarcophagus weighed 250 lbs).  Beyond that, they had the 15 rings he was found wearing and his 13 bracelets.  What was really amazing about his tomb was that it seems like after he died and was buried they just chucked a bunch of other stuff from the time into his tomb.  It has now all been relocated to museums (which is why it isn’t really worth it to pay extra to go into his tomb at the Valley of the Kings), but there was a bunch of stuff.  Even just in the Egyptian museum there was an entire wing of the upstairs dedicated to, and much of it was just out in the hallway.

Now, bring me that horizon

The mummies really were gross.  But also really neat.  Most still had hair, some you could see eyelashes, some had manicures (which meant they were well cared for), and all that we could see still had teeth.  The funniest one was Queen Hatshepsut’s.  Evidently it was found in a weird place and thus originally discarded as just another mummy.  However, someone suggested it could be her, and some tooth they found in her tomb fit perfectly into her mouth.  Now they’re pretty sure its her, but the card says something like “this mummy of an obese woman with bad teeth is believed to be Queen Hatshepsut…).  She was only the most powerful Queen until Cleopatra, and may have even been more powerful.  But no big deal, she was just fat and ugly.  Also, one of the kings had died in battle, and his body was maimed and his arms were in really awkward positions. It was really gross.

However, once we got downstairs, I realized I didn’t have my sunglasses.  Please, do not ask where I left them, or if I retraced my steps, or whatever.  1 – Patrick already did. And 2 – I literally have no idea where I would have set them down.  I can’t even remember when I last had them, but I do know I wore them on my way to the museum, which means I probably set them down and they are now gone.  Which is really, really frustrating for two reasons: first, because when my mom graciously bought them for me, she said, “don’t lose these,” and second, because I don’t like how I look in sunglasses, but I legitimately liked this pair, and I know I’m not going to be able to find another like it around here.  Fortunately, I’m only going to be here another day.  But unfortunately, I’m still really mad I lost them and I feel bad.  Sorry mom.

After the museum we went to walk down the Nile and take a felucca ride.  On the way we passed a local who, like all the others, asked where we were from.  We said America and he went off about how his son lives in Tulsa and his daughter is getting married tomorrow.  He says he’s the director of something, and then asks if he can give us his card and a cup of tea so if he ever is in the states we will return the same hospitality.  So we had some tea (which was great cause I love tea now) and he starts going through some of his papyrus paintings.  He let us each pick two we liked and said because he liked us, and didn’t care about money, he’d give them to us for free.  He proceeds to have his daughter who was to “be married tomorrow” write our names on them.  Then he starts to talk about how much they are worth and what we should pay for them, which was confusing given he said they were free.  Then he tried to sell us that he’d just give them to us for the material costs, and that was a good deal, and that whatever he made today he was giving to his “daughter” for her honeymoon.  At this point we were a little annoyed, especially when his material price was more than what we paid for another painting at other stores.  It was also growing more sketch cause he offered to send paintings with us to Vienna that we could give to a guy in a store and send him half the profit we made.

Yeah I shouldn't be in charge...

Why did we trust him more?  Not sure, when we sat there over tea, pat told him he’d been to Japan he spoke fluent Japanese, and then he talked to us in German for a while.  He also knew a lot about the states, which I guess made it more believable.  At any rate, I actually kind of wanted my paintings, so I gave him a 20 cause I had it on me (which is as much as I paid for one at another store, and I now know was way too much, which is why it would be nice to have a Egyptian with me cause we way overpaid for almost everything on this trip and it’s really frustrating to just get sucked in like that, but 20 was way less than he asked for anyway so I guess I got an ok deal for two), but pat had less on him and also knew it was one big scam.  

Another felucca boat

So he offered a pretty low price and pulled them back out and said if it wasn’t enough, the man shouldn’t have offered them for free.  To which the man said he didn’t say that and he said he’d give us them at what the materials cost.  Pat responded that he never said what that was, and the man said we didn’t ask.  They argued for a bit, the man ended up lecturing us about how Americans don’t trust people (the second time we’d been lectured today).  Funny enough, despite saying he didn’t care about money, he was pretty upset, and ended up taking the tube pat’s paintings were in and putting it on his desk.  So pat didn’t get any, but then again it was one big scam anyway and now the guy has two paintings with stuff written in Arabic and hieroglyphs on them that he won’t be able to sell to anyone.  So I guess what goes around comes around.

It was pretty relaxing

Finally we left and we’re a little annoyed and mad so we walked down the Nile and found the felucca rides.  We probably over paid for our ride, but it was a total of 12 dollars for an hour ride on a sailboat on the Nile, so it was worth it.  It was peaceful and relaxing.  We rode with Captain Aswan, who also told us he was from Aswan, so we assumed he was named for where he came from.  But it was really nice to just relax on the Nile and enjoy the breeze.  We then walked back to the metro and came back to the hotel to relax before dinner.  And that brings us to now…so that’s all for today.  Tomorrow is our last day here before we leave, and all we have on our slate is the light show at the Sphinx tomorrow night besides packing.  I think we’re about ready to take off – we’ve seen everything we wanted to, and we’re getting a little tired of fending off (sometimes unsuccessfully) people trying to sell us stuff.  But it has been a fantastic trip so far, so hopefully it all ends on a good note.

The sun was a little bright, but whatever it was nice of Aswan
to offer to take a picture.