I was looking for pictures of King Tut's tomb and found this page of many alleged alien photos. It's pretty cool, even though you know they're mostly? fake.
This weekend we made our way down to Ft. Lauderdale to see everything but King Tut's mummy. Seeing as Ft. Lauderdale is probably the closest that all of King Tut's stuff is going to be to me for a very long, long time--I'm glad that I got to see it. The same way that you know that you should probably see the pyramids at some point in your life (being that wonder of the world and all), you know that if you are just a short drive away from two floors of ancient and sacred and cursed objects--you should be seeing them.
That said, this is the smarmy I'm-a-jackass-stuff that I learned this weekend...
1. All of those beautiful golden statues and masks and things that made Egyptian tombs so very robbed--they're actually carved out of wood. Call me stupid, but I see these pictures in National Geographic and I think, "That is one BIG hunk of gold." Like King Tut's mask--just think of how much gold that is! But it's all wood that's been dipped in liquid gold. All of it. I can't possibly be the only one that's had this misconception. Please tell me I am not the only one that's stupid enough to think that the Egyptians were carving seven foot sarcophaguses out of a solid slab of gold.
2. The exhibit didn't actually have any of Tut's several, nested sarcophaguses--or even the famous mask that they use in every brochure and ad for the exhibit. (They did have aother pharaoh's mask and sarcophagus.) This was kind of a letdown because...
3. The crowd was so overwhelmingly large--full to capacity at nine in the morning--that by the time you make it through the maze of rooms, you've been knocked around more than a few times. By the time you've made it to the end, you really feel like you deserve the mummy. You want to see the mummy. You've been sandwiched between six hundred other people for two hours and you've seen all kinds of statues and chairs and boxes and things--but you're getting tired and you want an encore. You want to see the mummy. Or a mummy. But you'd settle for the sarcophagus or the mask but they don't have any of that.
Okay, now the facts that I'm reading online are.
1. Today, the mummy is still in the original tomb, so that's cool. I mean, it's the least we could do after stealing all of his afterlife treasures.
2. At least one of the sarcophaguses is solid gold. So I guess I'm not that crazy. Still, all of the stuff we saw was covered wood.
The strangest thing about the trip was that it was the first time I went back to South Florida since I moved away from there at nine years old. Back to Broward County, where I was born. I was looking for anything I'd remember from when I was younger--like the billboard I saw for Lion Country Safari--a zoo that you drive your car through. The main thing I was looking for was this water park called Atlantis that I have very fuzzy memories of.
I found it. Just now, online. It closed after being damaged in Hurricane Andrew.
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