An Egyptian Excursion – Day 5: The Egyptian Museum in Cairo

Today was the day I feared on my big trip to Egypt: the journey to Cairo. I had arranged everything beforehand but still worried something might go wrong, as I never got around to purchasing a SIM card and would be without any internet for much of the day. In the morning, I took a cab from the ship to Aswan Airport. The rest of the group had left by van to Hurghada, and my guide offered to book the car for me before he journeyed with them. I found the car and driver exactly where the guide said I would. Without communicating very much, he dutifully deposited me at the entrance to the airport within half an hour.

I was surprised by the sheer number of planes leaving for Cairo: There must have been at least one every hour. I was even more surprised, however, when I boarded my plane to find it half-empty. I wondered whether it was necessary to be running so many flights if they were going to be so sparsely occupied. Through the window, I saw us leave behind a grey haze and then return to it again as we descended into a clouded Cairo. I was fortunate in my seating arrangement: I was put on the left side, which gave me a view of the pyramids towering above the city’s fringes.

I was unable to connect to the airport Wi-Fi when I arrived in Cairo, encountering the same problem I had encountered when trying to connect in Aswan. The welcome page always asked for my phone number and then proceeded not to send me the code to connect. Nevertheless, I found my driver easily – or rather, he found me as soon as I walked out of the arrival hall and approached me showing me a picture of myself on his phone. When I was organising this trip, I arranged to be picked up by my hotel and was asked to send a picture so that the driver would be able to recognise me. Instead of requesting an ordinary pickup, however, I had the driver take me to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Since I knew I would not be able to text him, we arranged for a pick-up at four o’clock, which gave me around two and a half hours to spend among the artefacts.

Two and a half hours turned out to be just enough time for a moderately paced walk around both floors of the museum. On the lower floor, I walked clockwise through the chronologically ordered exhibition, viewing exhibits from the Old Kingdom all the way to the Roman period. On the upper floor, I also walked clockwise, but this did not have the same effect, since the upper floor is not chronologically arranged. Rather, it has several exhibitions focussing on major collections, such as the mummies and funerary items of Yuya and Thuya or objects from the tomb of Psusennes. It also exhibits an astounding number of coffins.

The star of the Egyptian Museum, however, is Tutankhamun. Although this collection was supposed to be moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza last year, the items were still in Cairo during my visit. This goes to show that one should never take the timelines of public building projects at face value, which is a lesson that the writers of my guidebook should have heeded before writing about the transfer of Tutankhamun’s belongings in the past tense. The exhibition has practically everything that was found in Tutankhamun’s tomb beside the mummy itself: the two gold coffins that were meant to fit inside one another, the iconic golden death mask, and a host of smaller items including golden covers for the fingers and toes, broaches with scarabs, neckpieces, and dozens of rings.

Perhaps because I have been reading Cavafy in preparation for my trip to Alexandria, the sight put me in a tragically romantic mood. Tutankhamun’s mask depicts the pharaoh at the peak of his youth, his features masculine but gently traced and his fake beard affixed where a real one had probably barely begun to sprout. Despite all the splendour he had been buried with and the beauty of his post-mortem image, Tutankhamun now lies bare and shrivelled in a glass box in Luxor while his beautiful attire for the hereafter lies unused at a museum. I do hope that the Ancient Egyptians believed these physical accoutrements were only necessary for the journey to the underworld and that afterwards, the person would have no need of them.

One thing I learned subsequently about the Egyptian Museum was that its founder, the Frenchman Auguste Mariette, wrote the plot of Aida, which became the basis of the libretto for Verdi’s famous opera. The opera received its global premiere in Cairo’s Royal Opera House, the only such building in Africa for a number of years. The very day of my return to Prague, I saw Aida at the National Opera House, which was quite a surreal transition.

My driver picked me up as we agreed, and we proceeded together to my hotel in Giza. Or so I thought. The driver did not know where exactly the hotel was and followed Google Maps only to the general location. I did not see any signs for it however, and when I looked into Google Maps myself, I saw it marked a few hundred metres away. I asked the driver to take me there instead, but I could not find any signs there either. Nevertheless, I left the car and eventually found my way into a dilapidated apartment building that had the name of my hotel written on a dusty signboard out front. There was no lobby, but a local boy noticed me wandering around and showed me into the elevator. He pressed the appropriate button but – since he could not reach – passed me his key card so that I could swipe it and authorise the request.

This highly puzzling way of entering the hotel was, of course, not the right way to enter the hotel. I was received with a great deal of bemusement by someone who seemed like a receptionist at what seemed like a small hotel lobby with the name of my hotel written on the signs around, but it became clear that this was probably not my hotel as the receptionist spoke no English and could only communicate with me by dictating into Google Translate. Eventually, she had to call in a whole group of people who pieced together some English sentences and instructions. My hotel, they told me, was in the initial place the driver had taken me, despite the fact that neither of us could see it. Whatever the place that I had accidentally ended up in, it merely happened to have the exact same name as my hotel and was on the same long street.

I therefore walked back to the first place I had been dropped off to look for the hotel. Once again, I failed to find it, and growing somewhat worried I dipped into the nearest inn I could find to ask for directions. The receptionist spoke no English either, and the person he gave me on the phone spoke only marginally more. It occurred to me that instead of this fool’s errand, I had better just use the Wi-Fi at the inn to contact my hotel and have them figure out what to do. Long story short, I was shortly rescued by the appearance of my hotel’s receptionist, who brought me around the block to a compound whose name was overgrown by plants and which both I and the driver had consequently missed.