Egypt 2023 - Day 2 - Cairo Museums & the Alabaster Mosque

 Today was a full day, starting at 8am with the hotel breakfast. Our good friend Gordon arrived late the night before, and his arrival marked the completion of our six-person group. The tour gave us a little upsell presentation about all the “extras” we could participate in (and pay for) on the cruise. Since we’re likely not to return to Egypt any time soon, we opted into almost all of them despite the added expense.

Our first stop was the massive Egyptian Museum. According to their website, they house more than 170,000 artifacts in over 10,000 square meters of space. December is the peak season for Egyptian tourism, so the museum itself was packed to the gills with people. Our tour guide steered us through the crowds to all of the best “highlights” of the museum, including a large statue of Ramses, the ‘first-ever’ known painting (its of ducks), the best preserved wooden statue in antiquity, the earliest known painted statue, and of course, the relics of King Tutankhamen.

Let’s focus today, though, on a quite interesting Pharaoh, Hatshepsut.

Head of a statue of Hatshepsut, Egyptian Museum 

Hatshepsut was the queen married to the Pharaoh Thutmose II in the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt, who also happened to be her half-brother, as her and her husband’s father was Thutmose I. When her husband died, the natural progression of the line should have gone to her stepson, Thutmose III, but instead, she sent him off as a general of the Egyptian army to conquer Nubia (which he did). She assumed the Pharaocy instead, but since the Pharoah traditionally needed to be a man, she did so with a false beard, wearing men’s garments, and lived and acted as a man during her reign (this later part, according to our tour guide.) Egypt was quite prosperous during her reign, but when her stepson conquered Nubia, she jailed him there to prevent him from ascending and taking her kingdom. When she died, her stepson, Thutmose III, assumed the throne and attempted to remove all traces of his step-mother’s dynasty from the world by destroying or hiding her statues and obelisks.  Very few pieces remain.

The other really interesting piece that resonated with me in the museum was the Canopic Jars of Tutankhamen. Canopic Jars contained the organs of the mummy — specifically the lungs, stomach, liver, and intestines. The heart was left in the body to be judged by Osiris in the afterlife. The canopic jars of Tutankamen were made of Alabaster and stored in a wooden chest covered in gold. The alabaster glowed like an eggshell.

Canopic Jars of Tutankamen, Egyptian Museum

The narrative of the Egyptologist seemed to skew a bit towards the nationalistic on a lot of things. Each of the highlight artifacts was the first, oldest, finest, or most beautiful in the world. The most incredible (in the original sense of the word) of his stories was in regard to the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

In this version of the story, the British Archaeologist Howard Carter, who had been searching for the tomb for 10 years in the Valley of the Kings after having found a papyrus indicating that it existed, was riding his horse in a specific portion of the desert and fell into a small pit. Carter abandoned the horse and returned to camp, and a young Egyptian boy then discovered the entrance to the tomb after clearing out the sand from the pit where Carter had fallen. He ran off to tell Carter, who then confirmed it was the entrance to Tut’s tomb. The Wikipedia article on the tomb's discovery seems to confirm relatively well that the young boy indeed made the initial discovery.

Of course, we did see the beautiful golden head mask and sarcophagus of Tutankamen, which are gorgeous and nearly flawless pieces, two of over five thousand artifacts discovered in his tomb, the only one in the entire Valley that hadn’t been raided by robbers over the many thousands of years.

After a few hours in the museum, we returned to our buses and headed out to a large hill overlooking Cairo, atop which is perched the Fortress of Salah ad Din, anglicized to Saladin, which houses the Alabaster Mosque. You can actually see the Alabaster Mosque from our hotel room, far off in the distance.

The Alabaster Mosque at the Fortress of Salah Ad Din

The Fortress was built by the eponymous ruler of 12th-century Egypt to keep out the Crusaders, a function for which it was never actually used. He built the Alabaster Mosque after twenty years of reign. It is modeled after the Blue Mosque in Turkey but is significantly smaller. The mosque is still quite grand in scale and beautiful, with its silver domes and minarets reaching towards the sky. You might find it interesting that female tourists are not required to cover their hair inside the mosque, which is still used for worship, but we all did have to put on shoe coverings to tread its marble floors. Inside, the mosque is exquisitely patterned with mosaics and Arabic writing. Of course, there are no paintings or icons of any kind, but the lettering at the bases of the domes was art in itself. Our tour guide gave us a brief overview of the 5 pillars of Islam and told us that the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is required of all Muslims of able body and financial means, costs over 10,000 USD to perform these days! If you cannot afford to do the Hajj, you can have someone go in your stead, which our tour guide said he did for his father. Walid said he did the Hajj for his father and himself at the same time and joked that it was a great two-for-one deal.

Our last organized stop for the day was to another museum, the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. This museum was almost brand new at the time of writing this, having opened in 2021, and focuses on the progression of Egyptian culture from prehistory to the 19th century. It also houses almost all of the Pharaonic mummies in existence and displays them all in temperature-controlled glass cases. I wish I had some pictures of the corpses because they were really fascinating, but no photography was allowed in the mummy exhibit. A few even had CT scans showing their skeletal structures and indications of trauma, disease, and cause of death. Really wild stuff. There was also a nice room that showcased the progression of garments and textile work across the millennia. All in all, it is a very nice addition to Cairo’s cultural sights.

Statue of Ankenhaten at NMEC

It was about 16:00 at this point, and everyone was wearing down. The jet lag was starting to take its toll. We returned to the hotel and rested for about an hour, then retired to the bar where cold martinis were hammered and good talks were had. Realizing that tonight was Christmas Eve (the first time any of us had even thought about it), we suddenly grew concerned that we wouldn’t be able to find a place to eat at the hotel that night. The Egyptian restaurant, Zitouni, the same place we have breakfast every morning, was doing a Christmas Eve buffet-style dinner, but they had no reservations available. Luckily, Uniworld has a lot of sway, and Stephanie got on the phone with our handler, Ahab, the Captain, and he pulled the necessary strings to get us in. It was a pretty amazing spread, the highlight being the spectacle of the dessert table filled with tarts, Yule logs, cookies, macarons, jellies, puddings, and a very interesting bread pudding called Om Ali, which is runnier and less sweet than our traditional bread pudding, but very creamy. I liked it. Some of our group weren’t so keen.

Dessert Table for Christmas Eve at Four Seasons Cairo

Tomorrow starts very early. 5:00, in fact. We must get to the airport to catch a local flight to Luxor with the rest of the cruise-goers. Tomorrow, we’ll be headed to the temple complex at Karnak and then board the ship for a (hopefully) relaxing remainder of the day. Thanks for reading, everyone!

Hawaii and Japan, 2014 - 11/5 - Day 20 - Ueno Park, Vintage Shopping and Curry

Breakfast today was again on the 30th floor dining room at the Grand Pacific Le Daiba hotel. This time we had a table that directly overlooked the harbour. With our remaining day in Tokyo we did a few less obvious things in the city...

We headed out to Ueno, another large neighborhood in Tokyo. Our original goal was Ueno Park, but we became sidetracked in doing some off-Ginza shopping in some of the side streets in the Ueno area. It was a little cooler and Sean hadn't brought a sweater, so he picked up a hoodie with some lovely bad English translations on it. I believe it says "Attention No Section GH University" Which I'm pretty sure is not a real place. (The closest thing I could get in a Google search was the University of Ghana.) Feeling slightly reenergized by shopping, we ventured off to Ueno Park.

Ueno Park is a large public park in the Ueno neighborhood, and home to several museums including the Tokyo National Museum, the National Gallery of Western Art and the Tokyo Science and Nature Museum. By now the leaves in Tokyo were starting to change a bit more, but they hadn't taken on the fiery oranges and reds that we had hoped for coming to Japan in the fall. It was still a very scenic place and worth a walkthrough.

Life-sized sculpture of a Blue Whale in front of the Tokyo
Museum of Science and Nature

We chose the Science and Nature museum as our musée du jour but as this is day 19 of our trip, we were pretty well exhausted going into it (the extra shopping energy had started to fade.) The rooms were warm, and there were a lot of examples of the geological and fossil history of Japan. I'm sure it would have been fascinating if A: anything had been in English, and B: we were touring it at any other time in the trip but the last day of the last leg. Still, one of the up-moments was a 360 degree movie theatre that presented two short films (both in Japanese of course), one of which was about the creation of the universe, big bang and all, and the other was about the rise of the evolution of man. They were both bombastic and spectacular, though the computer graphics were a tiny bit dated. We struggled through about half of the rest of the museum before retreating to the cafe for a coffee - a vain attempt to recapture some energy that failed. Sitting in the cafe, we decided that our best course of action was to continue to do the one thing that had energized us earlier...shop.

A friend of ours spent some time in Tokyo last year and had recommended a shopping area known for vintage clothing, so we decided to hit up Shimo-kitazawa (charmingly ‘Lower North Swamp’). The vintage stores come at you right outside the subway stop, so we pretty much plunged immediately into shopping. Sadly, after a few hours of wandering in and out of little boutiques, neither of us came up with any treasure, but it was still a fun experience.

Tonkatsu curry with vegetables at CoCo Ichi

The last thing we had in mind for the day was eating some authentic diner curry. Diner curry is a staple of the Japanese businessman – much milder of spice, though often equal in spiciness, to Indian or southeast Asian curry. We decided on a chain, because it actually had pretty rave reviews in Trip Advisor, and went to CoCo Ichi, just outside of Shibuya station. I had a vegetable and tonkatsu curry at spice level 3, Sean had a vegetable and chicken katsu at spice level 2. The scale goes up to 10, but they won’t even serve you spice level 6 or higher until you’ve proven you can eat 5. While it was a little disconcerting seeing them cut open curry bags and tonkatsu bags and dumping things into pots and deep fryers, the end result was actually pretty darn good. Either the standard for fast food is higher in Japan (which is doubtful considering Burger recently released an All Black Hamburger there), or I don’t know good curry from shine-ola, or CoCo-Ichi makes legitimately good curry in their little plastic bags. Who knows?

Tomorrow is our last day, and it’s dedicated more or less entirely to travel. In fact, it’s really two days of travel, because we gain a day back when we cross the International Date Line. All in all our travel time door to door back home is going to be something along the lines of 20 hours. Needless to say I’ll be waiting until Friday to write my summary post.

Until then, goodnight good readers.