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How wonderful of Egypt and the International Community to come together to construct this museum to depict the lives of a disappeared culture as a monument in honor of…their own generosity. (more…)
January 15, 2008
Nile Cruise—رحلة النيل
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Embarrassing as this fact is, this was my second cruise on the Nile in only a couple months. It’s shockingly easy to live a posh middle-class lifestyle in this country with the right connections and a modest (by US standards) income. But this is not what I wanted to talk about (hopefully I’ll get up the gumption to be that reflexive about my place in this country in a later post). This cruise was part of the class on the Nile River that I and Adrienne are in. I’ve written extensively about the Nile cruise previously, here, here and here, with pictures from the trip in four previous posts (1, 2, 3, 4) so I’ll be keeping this somewhat short and condensing the four-day trip into one entry. (more…)
January 9, 2008
The Nilometer and Egyptian Museum—المنيل و المتحف المصري
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Our trip to the Nilometer and the Egyptian Museum was quite different than the one the previous day to the Egyptian Agricultural Museum. The Egyptian Museum is a stop on pretty much every tourist’s itinerary and is hence tended to by the government with all due care. I had been told that the Egyptian Museum was underwhelming and aged and dirty, but this was not my impression, perhaps because of my experience the previous day. The Egyptian museum lacked the smell of mothballs, the signs were legible, many of the displays were vacuum sealed (a rather more effective form of preservation than mothballs, I’d suspect) and we were blessed with Chahinda Karim as a tour guide. (more…)
January 8, 2008
Egyptian Agricultural Museum—متحف الزراعي المصري
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Museums are interesting creatures in general, but they seem to become even more so with a constrained budget. The lack of polish tends to bring the building blocks and construction methods—material and ideological—into relief. It’s difficult to focus on the other world into which one is being transported when the vehicle is backfiring and the transmission sounds like it’s about to drop. (more…)
