Saturday, May 24, 2008

Meet King Ramesses


Day 4 May 25 – 11.24 PM – Meet King Ramesses




Today I went to the Egyptian National Museum, After convincing the ticket man I was a student (to get half off ticket price) I bought my 5$ ticket. I took the subway to get there, easy just like other subways in London, Paris, or D.C. The Museum was relatively small, two stories, maybe 600 meters by 300 meters, but stuff was stacked to the ceiling. Most of the stuff was not very interesting because I don’t know much Egyptian history but there were two sections that would amaze anyone.


Here is me outside of the Egyptian Museum. Unfortunately, no pictures are allowed inside the building.





.....But rules like that have never stopped me before. If you turn off the flash taking a picture doesn't hurt anything.








First, the mummy section. You had to buy a special ticket costing 10$ but it was worth it. It is this small room, the only air conditioned room in the whole museum. But this one room had, I think, twelve mummified kings or

wives. The pictures, which I had to take “covertly,” speak for themselves. I mean how often do you see 3000 year old dlead kings?!? This is the most famous and powerful Egyptian King. THIS USED TO BE THE KING OF EGYPT, thats crazy! This was the king in the Book of Exodus, Moses lead the Jews from Egypt during his reign, some historians believe. Still has hair and everything!










The next stop was King Tut’s section. If my memory, and the History Channel, serve me right King Tut was a child king who died young. He was a very boring king who did not have the most impressive tomb compared to other kings. His tomb is special because it was not raided by tomb robbers because a more important King built his tomb on top of King Tut’s.

The King Tut section was amazing, gold, glass, and precious stones everywhere. Tut was buried in three coffins, each one fit in the one before it like those wood dolls. The other most coffin was made of thick, carved wood; it was about 12 long by 8 feet wide by 10 feet tall. The middle coffin was made of glass and semi precious stones held in place by gold. The innermost coffin was solid gold, surly weighing hundreds of pounds. After I left the Museum I went and wandered along the side of the Nile.

It was clear that unlike the Louvre the staff are normal police. At the Lovure the people working there seemed to really care about and know about the things they were protecting. The police at the Museum were much less enthusiastic, they were more interested in if you bought a ticket, not if you were leaning on or touching ancient objects.







Random Discoveries

Many police have AK rifles, many of them are empty

Almost no Egyptians own guns

Subways have separate mens and womens cars

Subway ticket costs 25 cents

May have to start taking that Imodium…

Atlas Shrugged is way too long

No traffic police, I have seen no police cars.

The kings were really short, like 5 foot nothin.