Yesterday, Chris took the day off work so that it wouldn't look suspicious that he was also taking Wednesday off. (It was his work's annual "Day of Giving" and they were going to the zoo to repair animal cages or something. With his allergies to both animals and plants, he decided he would rather take a pass.) Since he was home anyway, and the kids had the afternoon off from school, he bought us all tickets to the King Tut exhibit here in Zurich. It isn't the actual stuff they found in King Tut's tomb. Apparently, the Egyptians aren't so keen to let that stuff out of the country. :( But, these amazingly talented artists have made copies of every single thing found in the burial chambers, right down to the missing pieces, scratches and burn marks. But since it's fake, they don't have to be as careful with security and you can get much closer to the items.
The display was housed in the old Toni Yogurt factory near where we go to church. It's a bit strange going to a museum-worthy display in an old building like that, but once we got inside, you couldn't tell. They had carpet covering the floors and curtains were hung over all the cement walls. They also had the house lights down really low, with spotlights on all the different displays. It was so dark, then when we walked outside afterwards to go home, our eyes were hurting from the sunlight, only it was overcast!
There were several movies explaining the lineage and history of King Tut's family, so that you understood a bit more about what you were looking at. They also had a very interesting film about Howard Carter and his struggles to find something of interest in Egypt. He also had a terrible time convincing his financial backer to even apply for a digging permit in the Valley of the Kings. They showed a reenactment of them first discovering the seal across the tomb door, then paused while we all walked to another display. Slowly, with someone reading excerpts from Carter's diaries, they would light up the display a little bit at a time, until you finally saw everything just the way they originally found it. They repeated this process for the next two chambers, then the rest of the exhibit was everything taken out of the chambers and displayed individually. Even though the films were all in german, and the displays just had a lot of text that the younger ones couldn't read, they still all really enjoyed themselves.
Noah had been a bit apprehensive that there would be a bunch of scary mummies, but there were only a few photographs of those, nothing too yucky. I think the highlights were the thrones and jewelry for the kids. I really loved all the different sarcophagi laid out one after the other. I never realized before how large it was, but it filled almost the entire room. It was definitely taller than Chris. Then inside that was another one, slightly smaller, then another and so on. I think there were about six boxes, and then they finally got to the ones that were in the familiar human shape with the death mask and all that. There were at least three different ones of those as well. They took the preservation of the body seriously!
I also never realized, or had forgotten if I knew it at one time, that Nefertiti was his mother. As a souvenir I got a magnetic bookmark with her image on it. You know, us beautiful people gotta stick together. haha The girls got little turquoise colored scarabs to make into necklaces, and Nick was satisfied with a postcard. It was a very nice afternoon and I am so glad we went. Thanks Chris!
(It was so dark, that there really was no point in trying to take photos with my camera. Sorry.)