Our second day off here in Cairo began with a morning at the Egyptian Museum. It’s just about the coolest collection of items you could ever imagine—TONS and tons of items pulled from burial sites all over Egypt; mummy-holders and heiroglyphic tablets and statues, crockery, tools, games, jewelry, clothes and more---and all pretty much looking like they hadn’t moved since they were discovered and placed there in the 1930’s. There’s a whole wing dedicated to all the stuff they found in King Tut’s burial site—absolutely the most stunning array you can imagine, and let me just say; these hip hop guys today have NOTHING on the Pharohs when it comes to the Bling Department…they’re just a bunch of amateurs. One of the coolest aspects of The Boy King Wing, I thought, were the photos of the insides of the tomb when they found it, when all the items were just stacked up the way they had been left thousands of years ago. The entire museum is like no other place you can imagine, but kind of weird….it feels more like a warehouse than a museum. Our new and most excellent friend Sherif said they’re going to build a new one, a modern museum more in keeping with, um, modern museums. One of the things that’s a drag about the place though is that, apparently, there is a warehouse below the main museum, and stuff gets stolen out of it all the time, but no one’s really sure what because it’s never all been completely catalogued. Not good. After 3 hours or so our heads were swimming with all that we’d seen, so we took the 2km stroll across Nile and back to our hotel. After a nap it was downstairs for a very late lunch, and an interesting lesson; never ever have shisha on an empty stomach (when I told Sherif I had done this he looked at me like I'd stuck my hand into a pile of bees, expecting everything to be fine and dandy. “Of course, you never do that. Never.”). Shisha was great, then lunch was great (more mezzahs, etc), then more shisha was great…until it wasn’t great anymore, and very quickly. A few hours nap, followed by a long night sleep, seemed to mostly cure the situation. Sunday it was off to do employee interviews at the Johnson Controls offices, and---truly, what very nice people, just wonderful. Sunday night, our last night in Cairo, found Sherif, his chum from childhood Alaa, and me and Bobbi out at Khan el Khalili, the old old old souq from the 1300’s, enjoying some tea and shisha (well, shisha for Sherif; I think I’m giving shisha a rest for the time being), then enjoying watching Sherif barter with a shopkeeper for some great belly dance, oud, and other middle eastern music for me. We finished off with a fine italian mean, back on the Nile at Sherif's fave place, then it was off to the hotel for a nap before our 5am car to the airport and our journey to…Paris!
Hey, quick(-ish) postscript on the Middle East, since this entry marks the end of over 2 weeks of travel in this region for me. While I am, of course, nowhere near an expert on this place, I have to say I've learned a few things (many many thanks, again, go to Farhan, Josy, Tarek, Sherif, and others) and, like everything in life, there are subtleties in the human condition(s)--past and present--that very much need to be considered by those of us who would rush to simplistic judgement on what's happening in the region and what "needs" to happen (and by whose hands it needs to happen). Suffice it to say that we in the US would never want people in Egypt, Saudi, Qatar, UAE or elsewhere to base their perceptions of us as a society upon whatever they might read in the press about the Moral Majority or similarly fanatical, single-minded, religion-based groups. I have met the nicest, smartest, warmest, most open-minded and most considerate people on this leg of the journey, and I know for a fact that if everyone in the US could come to this region and experience society in action, we would all see that there are so many more similarities than there are differences in the ways we live and think day to day. Make no mistake; there are plenty of extremists, on both sides of the pond, to go around but, like Democratic and Republican operatives during the election season, they like nothing more than to enhance a polarized view of everything---it's what serves them best. But this is too easy; it relies on a lazy mind, and a complacent mind. We in the US did not get to where we are in 200 or so short years by being lazy and complacent, so why acquiesce to this now?
End of soap box speech; back 'atcha soon from Paris.
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