The Field Trip that Wouldn't End

No matter how much I enjoy museums, which is, hypothetically, quite a lot, there is a limit to how long I can be fascinated. That limit is usually around one hour, after which point my feet get itchy and I need to move on, preferably to the gift shop. Today my class had a field trip to the Agricultural Museum, which is very nice. We were hosted by a kindly professor/curator type who certainly knew all there is to know about ancient Egyptian agriculture (there is a whole building on the museum campus dedicated to it).

But he talked forever. We're long gone and it's possibly he's still there talking. We visited three rooms - two small ones and one large one. Dude talked about the items in those rooms for two hours.

Wow.

Still, I learned some important facts about ancient Egyptian agriculture whilst pacing in circles like a caged animal at the zoo. For instance, they made mummies of gigantic crocodiles and wore thong sandals made of reeds. Also they ate animal crackers which are now entertainingly displayed alongside modern animal crackers for comparison purposes. Here also is a diorama of ancient farming of wheat in which the miniature man in the middle has a very silly expression. Why did the museum model makers decide to render a face like that?



There was music playing the whole time in the museum which our host insisted sounded the way ancient Egyptian music must have sounded (how can they know that?). It was eerie in a good way, like a combination of traditional Chinese string music, saws and Gregorian chanting.

Far more entertaining than the ancient agriculture museum, however, was the comparatively descriptor-less Agriculture Museum in which are life-sized dolls dressed up in traditional clothes, scale models of various dams and barrages, and an entire upstairs full of rather bedraggled looking stuffed animal carcasses.


This museum is in a palace built by the daughter of one of Egypt's 19th century rulers, but it has not been kept up and so is charmingly dusty. The cases are often hard to see through and the poor lions below have shattered legs and a rather pathetic look about them. No kings of the jungle, they. I especially like how the middle lion, he with the man-doll companion, was just stuck in a dusty corner of the museum that I encountered by accident. Poor baby, someone went all Tonya Harding on him.



And look, a hippo! At one time hippos roamed all the way into the Egyptian portion of the Nile, but thankfully they no longer do so. Imagine if some wild hippo decided to waddle into downtown Cairo one afternoon - you may not think the traffic could get worse than it already is, but that'd do it. Those are some terrifying animals, look at the teeth! Bigger than my hand could hold - yes, I touched the exhibits. According to a nature show I watched one time, hippos kill more humans than any other wild animal in Africa and they can snap a crocodile in two with their mammoth mouths. I bet even lions are afraid of them, especially when those lions have shattered legs.