the mummies creeped me out a little

After living in Cairo for seven months (I know!), I finally made it to the Egyptian Museum. The thing about the museum is that, like many other things in Egypt, it has so much potential for greatness but is plagued by inefficiency. The museum is housed in beautiful mansion-esque building, and obviously they are overflowing with relics: royal mummies, the King Tut collection, dozens of statues and jewelry and all that other ancient Egypt goodness. But you also get the feeling that these priceless artifacts are not particularly well-cared for; the only room with temperature control is the mummy room (which you have to pay an additional fee to enter), and despite dozens of "no touching OR ELSE" signs, A1 and I spotted many people touching whatever they liked with no interference. In one place, we saw a 4000 year-old statue...with a telephone and notepad on top, being used as a desk. Yeah.

There is this wealth of artifacts arranged in the museum in somewhat chronological order, but things are just kind of loaded into display cases. Not everything is marked or labelled or explained, and in some places there are extra statues or whatnot kind of wedged in behind other things. It makes it a cool experience to explore the museum because you never quite know what you'll find, but on the other hand it can also be frustrating because you know you're probably missing a lot as well.

But anyway, the museum had tons of awesome stuff. There were shoes and jewelry that, even though they are around 5,000 years old, are still...wearable looking. The King Tut collection was also pretty cool, with all the loot they found from his tomb in the Valley of the Kings (which in Luxor, and which I visited with my family in December). The mummies...well. They are lying in glass display cases, and they are very...human looking. It's a little creepy. I did not think the movie "The Mummy" was scary, bu the actual mummies were a little disturbing. They still have hair and teeth and fingernails. Their skin is still on, so you can even tell what they might have looked like when they were alive, except that now they are shrunken and shriveled and have been dead for like 4000 years. So while I enjoy learning about ancient Egypt, I think that's enough mummies for me.

On a more random note: I know I have written before about how I enjoy Cairo Scholars. Well this afternoon I saw the best post ever, which involved someone asking to borrow a hamster. Not keep or adopt it, just borrow a hamster for a week and then return it. The individual noted that they would prefer a white one. Yeah, I don't know either, but it's funny.

in which jess guestblogs

This is Jessica (Aliza's youngest sister), guestblogging as we await our flight to Italy.

We just came back from the Nile Cruise. There were many hyroglyphic-filled temples in Upper Egypt, as well as many donkeys and camels, which made me very happy. The Nile Cruise was nice, although our room was in the third class- had it been the Titanic, we would have died. We toured with another American family from Boston. They were very nice, even if they did have a very small, squeaky child who seemed to know a lot about Egyptian mythology.

Cairo was a lot of fun. Cairo traffic, however, was not. The pyramids were very cool and large. Oddly, even though they are pretty gigantic, when the Cairo Smog was particularly prominent, you couldn't see them. I enjoy Egyptian food quite a bit- koshari, faoul, felafil, yum! And now we will go to Italy, where there will also be delicious food.

In other news. I rode a camel. It was wonderful.

-- Jessica (p.s. I also chose the tags for this post.)

cannibal kittens

Happy November to all! Hope everyone had a fun Halloween weekend -- mine was pretty tame, comparatively speaking. We were supposed to be going to a Halloween party at the American Embassy being hosted by the Marines (we have gone to a few other Marine parties and are friends with a few of them, so it's usually a good bet). Unfortunately, every other expat in Cairo under the age of 35 had the same idea as us, and there were MASSIVE lines to get in. So we took our costumed selves (there were like 15 of us) to El Mojito, a bar/lounge we go to pretty regularly. It was not an official Halloween party per se, but there were plenty of people in costume, so we had fun.

This is not the first time I have spent Halloween abroad, and it was just as underwhelming this time around. I don't know, I think that even though people try elsewhere, America is the only place where enough people have embraced Halloween (and its inherent tackiness) with enough enthusiasm to make it truly awesome. I have always loved Halloween; I love special showings of Nightmare Before Christmas and cheesy decorations and haunted warehouses next to Lake Michigan (which is what I did last year!). I mean, I had fun in Spain/London and in Egypt, but it's just not the same. OK, gripe over.

But something truly terrifying (not really, I just needed a segue) did happen this weeked. Cairo has a big cat problem -- they are just everywhere, dirty, starving, meowing, etc. One managed to find its way up to my floor (it climbed 14 flights of stairs, so that's true dedication), where it proceeded to sit in front of every door on my floor (there are four, and all face each other in a square) and just meow pathetically for extended periods of time. We felt bad, but giving it food is like giving it an invitation to stay, which none of us want. A few days ago we realized that part of the source of the meowing was that our dirty stray cat had 4 dirty stray kittens. Seriously, they can fit in the palm of my hand (if I tried to pick one up, which I absolutely have not done) and are tiny and so adorable. And they sat in the hall (vestibule?) and just meowed like crazy.

But yesterday we opened the door and found that the tiny adorable kittens had killed one of their brothers and sisters and were in the middle of EATING it. So disgusting. There were...parts...scattered around (paws, a head, other grossness). I slept through the initial sightings, but luckily A1 and A2 pointed it out to me later, lest I be spared the image of a dead cat's head becoming dinner in our hallway. Thanks, guys! Anyway, the bowab came and cleaned it up and shooed the remaining cats away, so that's good at least. But I think that might have taken care of any remaining desire I had to have pets.