Day 9: Egyptian Museum and Old Cairo

Today I woke up and saw the Nile from my hotel room—very cool. 

Cousin Stephen is sick today so it was just Connie and I going to the Egyptian Museum.

We are glad we are seeing this near the end of our trip since we have already seen the major temples and tombs.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to make better sense of this amazing collection of artifacts.

We were greeted at the entryway by our old friend, Ramses II.

I especially like these figures.  The first one is scribe and the second a reader.

 This was surprising.  We had seen color that has survived on structures, but never green.

 There were way too many pieces to put on the blog, but here are a few.

The inner sarcophagi paintings are really detailed. 

We ended with King Tut.  This was a real treat. It's astounding how many artifacts came out of that one small tomb.

These are jars that were filled with essential oils.  Tut's tomb was actually raided, but they only got into a very outer chamber.  It was filled with these alabaster oil containers.  They took the essential oils, but left the containers.  Lucky for us.

This is his throne.

At lunchtime, Connie went back to the hotel to be with Stephen.  I had lunch on the river with our female guide Noah before going into old Cairo.

I loved the street scenes as we drove from one side of town to another.

Our first stop was to visit the Citadel—a huge fortress started by Salah-Al-Din.  It’s gigantic. 

Inside is the Mosque of Mohammad Ali.  It is covered in Alabaster. The inside is beautiful.

We then went through old Cairo which is quite a ways below the level of the city.  We went into the Ben Ezra Synagogue and a Coptic Church.

Unfortunately, Stephen is really sick.  The hotel got a doctor to him really quickly.  Hopefully he'll be better soon.