This Week's Madrid Travel Tips

My latest travel tips to Madrid are up on PlanetEye. This week I write about a multicultural fair in Plaza Lavapiés, a very cool Egyptian cafe, and the Titanic exhibition. Drop on by and check it out!

New Pyramid Found in Egypt

It seems strange to say, but archaeologists have discovered a previously unknown pyramid in Egypt. Only the base has survived, standing to a height of five meters and completely covered by the desert sands of Saqqara, on the outskirts of Cairo. This brings the number of known pyramids in Egypt to 118.

It was probably the tomb of the mother of King Teti (ca. 2323-2291 BC) founder of the Sixth Dynasty. Women's pyramids were much smaller than the big pharoahs' pyramids we're used to seeing in pictures and on television. When I was in Egypt back in 1991 I crawled around in a couple. They'd crumbled enough that I could worm my way between the blocks and get into the interior.

After I got out of one an Egyptian said, "You shouldn't do that. There are scorpions in there."

Ooops. I guess Anubis didn't want me yet.

The BBC has a cool slideshow about it here.

The Middle East: Safe For Travelers?

The BBC has reported that a group of Western tourists and their guides in remote southern Egypt have been released after being kidnapped by gunmen ten days ago. They were being held for ransom until Egyptian, German, and Italian special forces attacked the kidnappers, killed several, and freed the hostages unhurt.

This sort of thing always makes people shake their heads and ask, "Why do you like traveling in the Middle East?" Well, I've never had any problems in the Middle East, unless you count the usual huckterism you get when you're a relatively wealthy visitor to a relatively poor country, or the insane driving practices of your average Egyptian cabbie. In fact, the Middle East is one of my favorite places to travel. You get fine hospitality, lots of ancient sites, beautiful architecture, cheap travel, and good food. What more could you ask for?

Of course there are dangers, and there are no-go areas. The border with Sudan and Chad, where these folks were, is one of them. People need to use their heads when they travel and understand that "Adventure" tours are not always the wisest way to go. There's nothing adventurous about going to a war zone just so you can brag to your friends.

I've been to Morocco, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, and the only place that anyone robbed me was Pakistan. One success and two attempts. No violence. That's not as bad as the time a gang of young thugs wanted to beat me up in a shopping mall in Connecticut (of all places!) until I pointed out we were in front of about a hundred people and they'd go to jail. It's also not as bad as the three times my car was broken into in Tucson. All in all, I feel safer in the Middle East. But you got to keep you wits about you, like anywhere else.

The Coolest Museum in the World

While I was up in Oxford last week I got a chance to visit my all-time favorite museum, Oxford University’s famous Pitt Rivers Museum.

The Pitt Rivers contains a massive collection of anthropological objects in a large gallery and two upper floors in displays that remain virtually untouched since they were set up more than a century ago. The collection started with a donation in 1884 of 20,000 objects from Lt.-Gen. Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, a pioneering anthropologist. Pitt Rivers was interested in the evolution of objects and organized his collection typologically, placing all items of the same use into a single case in order to show the evolution of form within and across cultures. The collection now boasts half a million objects from hundreds of cultures and still retains a typological organization.

The cases are cluttered with objects, and below them are drawers that can be opened to reveal more artifacts. Flashlights are available at the front desk so you can peer into the deeper recesses of the cases where even more artifacts are hidden. This style of organization gives a very different experience than the usual chronological order of most modern museums. You get bowled over by the sheer diversity of the world's cultures and their ways of solving common problems, everything from how to build a fire to how to play a tune. Overhead hang dugout canoes, catamarans, and coracles. There wasn't a case big enough to hold the "Watercraft" section so the curators decided to suspend them from the ceiling.

Enthusiasts of ancient Egypt should check out the case labeled Animal Forms in Art, in which a XII dynasty wooden ram’s head sits by a bronze cat representing Bast. Sharing the case are dozens of other animal representations from various cultures, some stylized, some realistic, some for worship, some for play. There’s even a 19^th century Danish piggybank. One of the most arresting objects is a wooden owl carved by the Ainu (Japanese aborigines) around 1900, which shows similarities in execution to the Egyptian ram’s head.

In the Votive Offerings case are XVIII dynasty blue glazed eyes and ears that are remarkably similar in form and function to those from a Catholic church in Madras dating to 1917 a.d. An example of how objects can change in meaning over time in the same place is shown in drawer 29.3, labeled Amulets, Charms, and Divination. Inside are nine modern glazed ceramic imitations of Egyptian figurines. In the early 20^th century, fellahin (peasant) men would go to a village and place them on the ground, and the women would jump over them in order to become fertile. That doesn't sound terribly Islamic to me!

Pitt Rivers was especially interested in weaponry, and one wall of the main floor shows the evolution of firearms, including a nasty 19th century trap gun to blast trespassers. On the second floor (first floor for you Europeans), another wall is taken up by spears and clubs from various African, Asian and Oceanic tribes. Don't miss the case on the ground floor showing the victims of one of these tribes. There are more than half a dozen shrunken heads, plus instructions on how to make them!

The Pitt Rivers is in the middle of a £6.7 million expansion that will provide new offices, laboratories, collection management facilities, a lecture theater, and study areas. Part of it is now open and it looks like it will be useful for visiting school groups. The main draw, though, will still be the famous Victorian displays, which the curators wisely left untouched. The expansion was supposed to be complete in the spring of 2007, and while the new facilities appear to be up and running, the top floor of the Victorian displays still hasn't reopened. Part of the problem is that the curators decided to use the expansion as an opportunity to recatalog the entire collection, but they discovered they had a lot of objects that weren't even cataloged at all. Now they have to go through every object, photographing, researching, and describing it. Hopefully they'll be able to reopen the top floor soon. In the meantime, it's still well worth a visit.

Travel Tip #2: Slow Down!

I was in the British Museum in London the other day, enjoying its fantastic collection of artifacts from all over the world, when I was yet again struck by how quickly most people rush through the main attractions of their trip. I was on the ground floor looking at some immense stone bas-reliefs from the Assyrian palaces, and people were shooting past like meteors. The scenes are amazingly detailed and well crafted, and although I've looked at them on dozens of visits I always find something new. This time I noticed that in one scene of a cavalry battle, there's a vulture flying overhead with some human entrails in its mouth.

Isn't it a shame that all the people flying past failed to notice this? It's not every day you get to see a vulture eating human entrails, and all those people missed their chance.

When I was in the huge Temple of Karnak in Egypt it was even worse. I got there at dawn in order to avoid the crowds, and for a couple of hours I had the place almost to myself. Even the vendors selling postcards and fake antiquities were still asleep. Soon enough, though, the air-conditions tour buses started pulling up, and the place was inundated with sun burnt Americans and Europeans. I sat down in the Great Hypostyle Hall in the Precinct of Amun-Re, a huge room nearly filled with massive pillars adorned with hieroglyphs. I'd sit admiring some of the pillars, then moved to see others. It was entrancing, and I ended up spending the entire afternoon in that one vast room, watching the shadows move, revealing new hieroglyphs and veiling others. It was the most memorable day of a memorable trip, and not one of those tour groups spent more than five minutes in the Hypostyle Hall. In their rush to see so much, they saw so little.

So when you're on a trip, slow down. It's better to see a few things well then a lot of things poorly. When you're on the road of life, always make sure you take time out to examine the entrails.