Very cool, but considering its fame, it is a really quite a terrible building to hold such treasures. It has NO air conditioning, so everyone is sweating bullets. Also the washrooms were complete shite; 3 dirty stalls and no toilet paper. Honest. no fucking toilet paper to wipe your sweaty tourist ass. At a world-famous museum it was boggling to have such terrible conditions. Was happy to remember that they are constructing a new modern Museum to move everything to. Wonder what they will do with the building once everything is moved.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/D5xY4f6.jpg)
THE ROSETTA STONE
The ACTUAL Rosetta Stone. So cool. Until this was found, no one could make heads or tails of ancient Egyptian writings. When this found suddenly they had a key (you can see heiroglyphs at the top, some old arabic (?) in the middle, and greek at the bottom), and suddenly Egyptology took a huge leap forward and everyone went crazy suddenly able to translate and read WTF it was all about.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/RieSUSY.jpg)
There was a story of a kid who (before they put glass up around most of the artifacts) snuck into this sarcophagus and waited until the museum closed. During the night he stuffed his pockets with gold and treasure, and the next morning he walked out with his pockets full no problem. However after leaving the museum, a policeman called the kid over to ask him something. The kid started running, and so of course was apprehended and they discovered all the gold he stole. Turns out that all the cop wanted from him was a lighter for his cigarette. If the kid had a light, or simply said 'sorry I don't have a light', he would have gotten away with the heist.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/psnEXDn.jpg)
this is the room where King Tutankhamen's gold and the famous mask were displayed. No photos allowed inside but you can see the mask here through the glass.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/vWfSE7B.jpg)
Apparently King Tut was not even any significant Pharaoh, he was small time and the other tombs like Ramses II for example would have likely had 1000x more wealth than Tut. Tut was just famous because its the most recent discovery, a big hype in the 1920's and that famous mask etc
Also apparently there is untold amounts of far greater treasure today in the private mansions of S Americal Drug lords, unwilling to give or even sell them back to Egypt to put in their museums!
Obama:
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_e_biggrin.gif)
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/qA27bXA.jpg)
I told you the state of the museum was shite, lol... this is an example of the quality of the labels on most of the stuff. They even spelled HORUS wrong twice here (Hurun and Horun)
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/Kix0gPN.jpg)
They had other rooms where no photos were allowed. One was a room of REAL MUMMIES of Pharaohs. I looked right into the face of Ramses II, not 10 inches away through some glass. His face was still relatively preserved, not shrivelled beyond personality, you could see his features and characters quite clearly. A living god in his day, maybe the most badass of Pharaohs and I got to look him in the eye up close. That was really weird.
Bus ride back to the Hotel. Cairo is so broken, man. EVERYTHING is broken. I would say at LEAST 50% of the buildings are unfinished, vacant, or collapsing. The whole city is like this, I did not see a single block of streets anywhere that looked even remotely modern or westernized. Bizarre
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/OHNlz8F.jpg)
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/A0nVhkp.jpg)