Egypt-Day 3-The Egyptian Museum and Sore Feet

Today was our excursion to the Egyptian Museum. I have to say that while we had a great time today, a lot of the trip was overshadowed by logistics and weather issues. To explain, when we got there it was about 107 degrees. Even our geography professor said it was hot and he’s a local. We were outside for probably twenty minutes and in that time we melted. I had sweat pooling in places I didn’t know it could pool, someone insisted we could cook a steak on their head, and by the time we finally made it inside the museum (which isn’t air conditioned) we were all on death’s doorstep. We felt guilty about being ready for a nap, but you can’t even imagine the heat, I’ve never been so close to passing out.
So now that I’ve got that out of the way, on to the museum. It was really amazing. In the sense that where else in the world can you find so much in one place. It has between 136,000 and 180,000 artifacts, estimates vary and they’ve lost count at this point. Only about 40,000 are on display but that is a significant amount and is on par with the Louvre. So we started wandering and trying to figure out what we were looking at but it was pretty unsuccessful. Something that I find amazing about places like that is that there is no tourist literature, and there’s no map, and there aren’t really very good descriptions of things. They were decent in some places, but not in others. There were entire halls the size of soccer fields that had pillars and sculptures and friezes that were all unexplained. Just sitting out.
Which gets us to the observation of the day. In my opinion, no Egyptian will ever have the right to ask for anything back ever again. Yes, I firmly support the British Museum and the Louvre and the Met and whoever else. Why? Because everything is on the verge of being destroyed. The sole exception to this would be the mummies, the majority of which were in climate controlled cases. But everything else was all over the place. For example. We sat down on a bench and leaned back. Ten minutes later we got up turned around, and realized we’d been leaning against hieroglyphics from 4000 years ago. We just did our part to erase Egyptian history. I saw several cases with mummy sarcophagi in them that had holes in the glass. The best was the one that had been resealed with packing tape.
It’s just depressing to see so much history so poorly protected. I understand that they can’t keep up with it, and I understand it is historically this country’s. But I’m also annoyed by all of the tourists touching everything they can and then drooling all over things. Not kosher in my book.
We went to see King Tut right at the end, only took about an hour of bad directions from people working in the museum. We made it there and, I have to admit, it was one of the most amazing thing’s I’ve ever seen. We got to see the tomb and sarcophagi and funerary mask, the one that’s pictured in every history book ever printed. It was absolutely amazing. The detail was beyond description. That was the highlight of the day and was a great reward for pushing through.
One thing of note, the museum was completely filled with foreigners. And they were all underdressed. We spent most of the trip griping about lousy Europeans giving us all a bad name. They were everywhere wearing nothing appropriate. Short skirts and shorts, low cut shirts, you name it, we saw it. In other words, everything culturally offensive that you can imagine. It was just amazing. What was surprising is that all of the Americans we saw were well dressed for the occasion. They were wearing acceptable outfits for Egypt. It was just painful for us all to see so many cultural faux pas.
The last little piece I’d like to talk about is one of the other highlights of the day. We met an Egyptian. His name was Michael and he was studying to take the tour guide test. He had a huge stack of papers and was studying when we sat down next to him. We sort of assumed that he was busy with his own thing and went about our business joking around and trying to let our feet recover. About fifteen minutes in, he started talking to us. Which might seem sort of creepy since he’d been listening in, but he was very friendly and wanted to know all about us. He told us a bit about himself and we were all excited to meet someone who didn’t have any ulterior motives. After awhile we had to keep moving cause it was getting close to the time we had to meet everyone so we got his number and email and said we’d try to get in touch with him later this week. So as we were leaving we saw him again and he asked for a picture with us. Fine, no problem, sort of strange for us, but also quite common pretty much anywhere you go. So as we went to take the picture, our program director Lynn yelled at us for holding everyone up. And as we took it she gave us a death glare. So we said goodbye to him, good luck on his test, and started to walk out. As we did, we told Lynn that we had met him earlier inside and talked to him for awhile. Here’s the kicker. When I said “oh he’s a great guy, really nice and all,” she replied, “whatever you say,” in a tone that’s hard to describe. But what annoyed us all was that because he was Egyptian, she was immediately suspicious and judgmental of him. Besides that, she didn’t want us interacting with him. I guess the whole thing really speaks for itself, but it was just awkward for us, being involved in something that was so unfair to him. What to say in that situation? She needed to calm down was the general consensus. But it just speaks to the whole tourist to local interaction. There isn’t a dialogue but rather a general mistrust. Which I understand is often based upon many negative events, but I can’t just automatically write off all Egyptians just because some of them try to make a buck off of me at the Pyramids. So be it. That doesn’t mean that all Egyptians are trying to take advantage of tourists.