(no subject)
Oh that was so cool! I just got back from the Eternal Egypt exhibit in Victoria and it was pretty amazing, I mean I didn't even notice that they hardly had any gold stuff on display. I took a day trip with the Captain and Tenille, starting with a really busy ferry ride from Tawassen over to Victoria. We made the mistake of buying the sunshine breakfast in the cafeteria, which was uber crammed full of people playing cards and taking up way too much space, we couldn't even find a table! Finally we asked this one lady sitting at a booth if she could move her crap off all the other seats so we could sit down and eat and voila! magic seating for 4. After we arrived in Vic, I bought us all tea and really expensive delicious food at the old Empress Hotel downtown. They usually have high tea there but it starts at 3pm or something so that was too late for us. But I just had hot chocolate anyways, because I like to shake things up. It's a super glam old building though, you really feel like a star ordering $8 soup. Then it was into the giant line up at the museum and the mad shuffle into the packed first exhibit room. Man oh man I seriously recommend heading in on a weekday, booking in advance and making ferry reservations to make sure you make it in on time cause it's soooo crowded. But anyways you get these nifty little cell phone things that you press buttons on and the disembodied voice of John Rhys-Davies tells you about most of the sculptures in the show. It's pretty cool seeing these big stone sculptures of different pharaohs and queens (and some regular Egyptian shmoes) and thinking that 5000 years ago these were in temples and on public display to be revered and adored because people thought these rulers were gods. It's amazing to see all the busts carved out of solid rock with such incredible detail, it really is fantastic. And the size of some of them is really impressive, my favorite was this big upper torso black rock sculpture of pharaoh Serepsis 3 or something like that, anyways it was also supposed to be the most popular one in London and I could see why. The expression was so formidable and it just looked rad, like a god would look. We really had to hustle though, we spent too many hours in the first few rooms and there are 8 in total to wander through. We stopped in one of the rooms to check out the historical movie about Ramses 2 and his (no kidding) 200 children, and the really interesting Cleopatra story about how she was pretty clever and seduced Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony all to keep her throne in Egypt. You could spend like 9 hours just wandering around that place, I didn't even get to see it all there was so much. And then I saw the papyrus scrolls from the Book of the Dead, and it was exciting that my ancient Egyptian knowledge actually paid off because I knew what they were and the stories behind them. Then they have a completely separate room that shows you exactly how mummies are made, and they have an actual mummified child on display. This made the Captain kind of uncomfortable because he thought it was like exploiting somebody's child laying there all naked and preserved, and I can see his point. I mean who really owns this stuff when it's so old? I heard the Brits and the Egyptians have this deal where the Brits gave back most of the expensive Egyptian artifacts in exchange for keeping some of these ones. It's sort of a gray area I think, who actually owns these things. Should this sort of history belong to anyone except the people who actually made it? Anyways and the gift shop was exciting too, I bought a scarab necklace, a rosetta stone silver necklace and something special for the Skipper landlocked at home. This exhibit really made me want to go to other museums and shows though, now I have a lust for gawking at artifacts and getting elbowed by people around me. I highly recommend it! You can't possibly be disappointed for $23 to see all that fab artwork and history all rolled into one exciting day. And then on the ferry back home we decided to go to the pacific buffet restaurant, where for $23 a person you can have a gorgeous lush window table, all the food/drink you can eat and have a really, really comfy non sneezed on ride home. So that was nice to end the day trip that way, although I did miss not going on the massage chair that feels like someone punching you in the back when it's not whining for money. So yeah, I'm a big fan of the island day trips and this one was pretty spectacular I'd have to say.