Adventures in DC

Thursday, Oct. 03, 2002
9:08 AM

I had a dream the other night that it was Saturday and I hadn't finished revising my handout or making my samples for my class at University. Then I (kind of) woke up and went, no, it's only Friday. Except, of course, that it was Wednesday. Whew.

So on Tuesday we went into DC for the day. For a lot of people, this is not an unusual occurence - for me, this is pretty rare. I don't go to DC unless I have a reason to. But there was stuff we wanted to see and do, so we parked illegally at the East Falls Church Metro station and hopped on a train. Kevin had some application/testing stuff to do for a potential job, so I was on my own for a few hours. I headed to the National Gallery to see the Egyptian exhibit, which is only there for another couple of weeks.

The exhibit is called "The Quest for Immortality" and has a lot of New Kingdom funerary artifacts. Pretty cool stuff. Lots of carvings, painted pieces, jewelry, etc. Since the Egyptians believed that in the afterlife you would retain your physical body and need all of this stuff with you, they had these little things called ushabtis that were models of little people, who were supposed to come to life and help you out, like servants. Those were pretty cool - they had little painted boxes to store them in. There was also a beaded net mummy cover, a sort of rectangular piece that drapes over the top. It had gold ornaments in it as well - very pretty. I tried to find a postcard or something of it for Liz, but alas, no such thing. The very last part of the exhibit was a life-size replica of a tomb - I forget whose, it might have been Amenhotep III - which had an entire funerary text written on the walls. It tells what happens to the soul of the dead pharoah after death. Neat stuff.

My main complaint about the exhibit was all the people. Lots of school groups, lots of senior citizens. I don't have a problem with kids in museums, but most of them have never been told how to behave - hell, most of the adults didn't know how to behave. Obviously, you have a lot of people clustered around a particular object or display - fine. I don't mind it when people cross in front of me to get to the other side, or get out of the way. But several times, while I was reading the descriptions or looking at an object, someone would walk right in front of me and stand there. They were completely oblivious that they were blocking my view. It was very annoying.

I wandered around the rest of the gallery for a little while, killing time. Visited some old friends, looked to see if they had any Vermeers (they didn't, at least, not that I could find) and then headed off to meet up with Kev. We decided a while ago that we wanted to go to the National Cathedral at some point so we figured we'd take this opportunity to do so. Took another train and a bus to get there, but it was very cool. We hit the bookstore first, since it was about twenty minutes to closing - I unfortunately didn't get to check a lot of it out, but oh well. Then we wandered around the cathedral for a while - the stained glass windows are beautiful. I'd seen a postcard of a mosaic in the bookstore, so I was hoping to find that, but no luck. I will have to ask someone whenever we go back. Kevin wanted to stay for the evensong service, so we did that, though I was pretty tired by that point and couldn't really appreciate it. After that we hopped on a bus back to the Metro station and headed home. It was a full day but I got to see a lot of cool things, and I know I'd like to go back to the cathedral when we have more time.

The rest of this week is all about cranking out mosaics. I'm expecting to get some new tiles today so I'll have more stuff to play with. I have two fears about the upcoming craft fair: one is that I won't have enough stuff and my table is going to look bare, the other is that I won't sell a single thing. Sigh.

Well, I'd better get to working.

Ciao!