For our first full day in Cairo, we elected to see the Egyptian Museum.
The hotel provided a free shuttle into downtown. The trouble is that its hours of operation sucked. The first shuttle wasn't until 10am, and the return shuttles were at 5pm, 10pm, and 12:30am. Not exactly great for sightseeing, but we made it work.
The shuttle lets you off at the bus station just behind the Egyptian Museum. From this vantage point, you could see dozens of billboards. These were just a small testament of how commercialized this area of Cairo was.Let me take a moment to talk about Cairo itself. It's the dirtiest, most polluted city I've ever encountered. There were vagrants and trash everywhere. The buildings and other infrastructure were falling apart. The air smelled like diesel fuel. You took your life in your hands just crossing the street. There were very few traffic signals, and the ones they had weren't obeyed. Lane markers were more of a suggestion than a rule. You used your horn in lieu of your turn signal. Everything was backwards and turned around. You'd take an exit on the highway only to take the next exit back the way you came. It was a crazy place. I wouldn't live there if you gave me a million dollars.
We weren't really in Cairo to see the city. We had specific places to go. Today we were seeing only one place: The Egyptian Museum. The museum is massive. Even so, it isn't big enough to house the avalanche of artifacts, statues, documents, mummies, chariots, jewelry, you name it, that has been scavenged from the thousands of years that the pharaohs ruled Egypt.As you walk in, you go through one security check where they screen your bags. Then you buy your tickets and go through the turnstiles. Then you go through another security check where they screen your bags. Cameras are not allowed. Somehow Ma made it through the security check #2, but I didn't. They sent me back out to the courtyard to give my camera to someone. Well, I wasn't about to part with my camera. So, I stuck it into my money belt and walked back through the metal detector. No beeps. I smuggled my camera in. I had no intention of taking photos; I just didn't want to give it up.
TRAVELERS' TIP: Take lots of water and a fan (electric or folded). The inside of the museum is like an oven. Despite the fact that it houses some of the world's most precious objects, it is NOT air conditioned.
Once inside, you can go to the second floor where you buy another ticket to see the mummies. That room is air conditioned, and the mummies look well-preserved and well-displayed. If only the rest of the museum were like that...
The King Tut area is also air conditioned. You can't miss the 24-pound solid gold funeral mask. It's so famous they put it on the 1 LE coin. There is also an air conditioned room that stored some royal jewelry and another room showing artifacts from the tombs at Tanis (in the Nile Delta).
Aside from these few areas, the way the objects are displayed is shameful. In any other museum, these pieces would be showcased as the most prized possessions of their collection. Here, they're randomly placed wherever there is room. People use them as footrests. People scratched their name into tomb walls. Descriptions were pitiful, wrong, or non-existent. It's a travesty to see things so poorly marked, so poorly lit, so poorly taken care of.
Despite all that, the Egyptian Museum is a must-see. You'll never forget it. My favorite items were the enormous black granite blocks covered in hieroglyphics. The carvings were so perfect. They appeared to have been carved by state-of-the-art CNC machines instead of many millennia ago by hand.
The courtyard had some interesting statues and obelisks, too.
The cafe in the museum's courtyard knows just how to gouge the tourists. There, a small bottle of water is 10 LE ("livres égyptiennes", or Egyptian pounds). That's about $2. If you go across the very busy street (run like hell, or walk a ways and use the metro as an underpass) to the Mobil gas station, you can get four big bottles of water for the same price (which is exactly what we did). We're taking it back to the hotel with us. At the hotel, a big bottle of water costs 16.50 LE or $3.30. That's also the price for a can of soda.This picture was taken by a British couple named Dan and Susan. They were also staying at the Oasis Hotel and visiting the Egyptian Museum that day. We ran into them a couple more times during our stay.
