Cairo - 'Modern' History

My second day in Cairo started a bit later (9am). In spite of that I was awake at 5am. I’m not yet “on the clock” properly, it seems.

National Museum

The bus and Ray collected me and drove me in to central Cairo (just under the hotel I’d stayed at before, actually) to meet Abdul at the National Museum. I don’t have any photos of this part of the trip because they are not allowed in the Museum. Abdul guided me through the highlights of the museum. There was clearly much that I did not see, so a return trip is a possibility. However, what we did see included some extraordinary pieces: Sarcophagi with beautiful handwritten coffin text (that is, cursive script not formal); alabaster statues; a beautifully painted paired statue that was 4500 years old and looked fresh and new. But the major highlight for me was King Tutankhamen’s treasures. The extravagance and beauty of these exhibits was quite overwhelming. Given the richness of the finds, it is a blessing that they were preserved.

The other highlight was seeing the mummy of Ramses II. Now, this guy Ramses II was a bit of a show-off, in my view. He annexed, appropriated, or built a huge amount of Pharaonic statuary and other tributes to his own aggrandizement. Having now seen his mummy among others, I’ve now learned that he ruled for some 67 years when other Pharaohs were lucky to live past 40 (Ramses II apparently died at 92!). So, if nothing else, he had the time to build up the showing off!

Burned out HQ

After the Museum, which is in the shadow of a burned out building, a mark of the revolution of 2012, we went off to lunch. That trip involved a detour trying to find a battery charger for my camera. No luck there as the place we investigated was all computer stores.

Abdul and I had a lovely lunch in a restaurant in Downtown. Being reunited with our bus involved a quite long wait because of the traffic in Cairo. Eventually, of course, we were off to visit the Citadel.

Street Scenes of Cairo

Burned out Jewelry Museum

The Citadel is an ancient fortress, palace and place of worship, dating back to the 10^th Century and the rule of Sal Adin (sp?). This is an extraordinary place with a rich history.
It is, however, another example of less than fantastic management of national monuments. The Jewelry Museum, a former palace for a queen, was destroyed by fire in 1970; it is still not refurbished.

The Citadel is located on a rocky outcrop above Cairo. The panoramic view of Cairo is breath-taking. It is also the home of a major mosque, built in the reflection of the blue mosque in Istanbul. The building is quite extraordinary, being lined on the bottom half with alabaster. The interior is equally awe-inspiring, not least because of the amount of open space created by the multi-domed ceiling. A huge, majestic, place of workship. (It's hard to photograph such a place and offer sense of the majesty of the place that you feel when there.)

There was the inevitable and interminable traffic to drive to Khan Ghalil bazaar. I saw a guy with a 6ft x 3ft sled used for carrying bread, perched on his head while he rode a bicycle against the traffic, dodging in and out of cars and buses! The bazaar is an amazing maze of shops selling every variation of tat. After a while, I was led into a complex of three shops by a guy I thought Abdul knew (turns out not so much). The resulting hard sell and bargaining resulting in my owning two beautiful pieces for way too much money (although much less than originally asked). I failed miserably at my first test of bargaining in a bazaar! I’m writing off a lot of the price paid as the cost of a lesson in commerce.

After the bazaar was another long ride through chaotic traffic to get back to the hotel in time for me to get ready to leave again for the sound and light spectacular at the Pyramids. The ‘spectacular’ is a laser and lighting show against the pyramids. It is quite interesting with some clever effects, especially when the lasers draw the outline of the tombs within on the Grand Pyramid. However, it has an odd soundtrack (over-the-top) and Omar Sharif reciting the text in a very plummy British accent. The overall effect was quite discordant, but it was an interesting ‘other’ perspective on the pyramids.

Sound and Light Show (hard to photograph; much more subtle than everything lit up a once, shown here)

The day finished with a room service dinner and re-packing my bags in preparation for a early start to travel to the central part of my trip to Egypt: the Nile Cruise.