Day 30 - Cairo - At the Museum

The first location today was the Egyptian museum, which houses a huge collection of artifacts from the Pharaonic era of Egypt's past including jewellery, decorated sarcophagi, chariots, statues, paintings, mummies and the famous death mask of King Tutankhamun.


This is the only photo I took.

The little-known Lego Dynasty, 3500-3000 BC

I'm sorry, this is a crappy blog post and you deserve better. Anyway, I saw King Tut's death mask, and it was strangely underwhelming compared to seeing the majesty of the temples and Pyramids. I think it's because I've seen so many photos of it, it's become too familiar. It was interesting to see the back of the mask though, which you never see in books or TV documentaries, and is as finely detailed as the front. If you want to know what it looks like you'll have to come to Cairo.

We interviewed Dr. Wafaa El Saddik, the museum director, who talked about the objects she chose for inclusion in the Egyptian Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. Afterwards we went to Ramses Square, a really busy junction where we filmed traffic and pedestrians as the sun went down.

Finally we paid a visit to the Intercontinental Hotel around the corner from ours, and filmed a live bellydancing performance, which was amazing. We'd been trying to arrange it for ages and it kept almost getting cancelled so it was great to finally get it done. We were previously going to hire a private bellydancer until we discovered that's a euphemism...

Wednesday is our last shooting day as we get a plane home at 9:20am on Thursday, so it'll probably be quite hectic. We're doing some more interviews, going to a Coptic Christian church, and also the airport.


One last thing: Zawi Hawass's team has released the findings of their DNA analysis of Tutankhamun that he told us about the other day. The Times Online has an article about it.