Sheila Wow, talk about good timing! The square & museum were inaccessible both Tues & Fri. & I was there all day Wed. & Thurs. In our perambulations, I'd lost track of what day it was & thought my departure was Thurs 1:05am, but it was Fri 1:05am. Luckily, I realized my mistake before heading for the airport & contacted Jimmy via Adel to change my airport transfer.
So, I ended up with 2 full days & spent them both at the museum. It is at once mind-boggling in its collection & infinitely frustrating due to its lack of labeling & overall abysmal curatorship.
I'd estimate that less than 2% of items are labelled at all. Of those, maybe 10% are decent labels. The rest have woefully inadequate information and laughably poor quality. Many are done on plain paper on a MANUAL typewriter!
Only the royal mummy room has any kind of climate control. Many items are not in cases & despite people going around with dusters, they have a layer of grit over them, like everything else in Cairo. The glass on many cases is also covered with dust - both inside & out. A curator from any other great museum in the world would have a conniption fit.
Just as well we didn't get there on Tues. It would have been a joke to go for an hour. Between the 2 days I spent approx. 12 hours in the bldg & it was barely enough to get a handle on the collection.
Thanks for the link, Julie. I went to the centre of Tahrir Sq. on Fri & shot a 360° video from pretty much the spot where the red dot is on the aerial shot on that linked page. My video includes 3 small tents, whose removal was referred to on CBC news today as a trigger for Friday's protest. I will, at some point, post the vid & send you all the link.
Travel Forum 2 years ago
