Egyptian Museum and downtown shots

Katie, Paul, Christina, and I headed downtown one sunny day for out first real life tourist activity! The Egyptian Museum!

Officially the most unorganized museum in the world, we were only able to navigate the buses on German and Japanese tourists, maze like stacks on mummified things, and boxes on ancient crap because of the Lonely Plant guide. Shout out to Lonely Planet. Woot woot!

Two highlights were...
All of King Tut's stuff and fulfilling a childhood fantasy of seeing everything that was in the book I remember reading non-stop for about year around age 10.
The animal mummy room, where beloved pets and revered animals were stored.

I would have taken more pictures but it was illegal.
The front of the museum and the inside was just as gorgeous and very unprofessionally laid out. There are boxes of ancient stuff just lying around with tiny diary sized locks on the glass doors to keep people out. I heard through the grape vine that there was not even a security system until about five years ago, who knows how true that is.
We saw King Tut's mask and all the fixings along with tons of mummy tombs, a gazillion small carved gods and about nine thousand pieces of jewelery.

I was not supposed to take pictures inside the museum, but I decided it was a good idea. Until a police man came up, tried to walk away with my camera, at which point I yelled at him "if you wanted it you should have taken it at the door." He replies "Baksheesh," aka tip me. I hand him 5 pounds, he says "this is very little." I walk away with a few pictures, he walks away with five pounds.

Inside the Egyptian Museum there is no such thing as security or hidden storage.

Street shots of Downtown Cairo, near Tahir Square.