5/12/98: Day 50 of our journey! To celebrate, we did laundry. After lunch we headed to the American Embassy only to find in closed. Checked and sent email at an internet cafe. And went to a movie with Nick and his friends.
NOTE: Main photo above is the burial mask of King Tutankhamun, Cairo, Egypt, 1998.
5/12/23: We were thoughtfully ruminating all day on reaching the milestone of 50 days on the road. It was staggering to think we could be a few thousand miles from home, with over 300 days to go on our journey, but that we could send and receive email from family and friends that arrived almost instantly. Not that far away after all.
We were also still in awe after our visit on the 11th to the The Egyptian Museum. Some of the oldest things on earth are in that building. It really staggers the imagination to come face to face with antiquities, to see and smell things that are 5,000 years old! I can still vividly remember the wonder of seeing an exhibit called “The Treasures of King Tutankhamun” in 1977 at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The exhibit of the “boy king” made stops all over North America, and the over-commercialization of the tour was humorously criticized by Steve Martin on a Saturday Night Live skit. The resulting song, “King Tut,”* had a catchy musical hook and was absurdly funny, so it actually was on the radio for months! Seeing the exhibit as a child in Chicago instilled wonder and an appreciation for history. Seeing the exhibit, and so many others, in person in Cairo was unforgettable. There were almost no other visitors in the museum, and we could stand just 2 feet from King Tutankhamun’s burial mask (seen above). Thanks to the wonders of modern technology in 2023, you can actually take a Virtual Tour of Tutankhamun Collection. It’s the next best thing to being there.
*Steve Martin’s costume and ridiculous dance moves in that SNL skit is quite probably the origin of The Bangles’ song / dance move “Walk Like An Egyptian,” which I mentioned in yesterday’s post!
UPDATE (5/13/23): I found this article about the 1977 exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago.
