I’m amazed at how places don’t match up with our expectations.  To me that is always more interesting than a place that was exactly how one imagines it.

Back in the 1993, I took a trip to Greece and Egypt.  As an archaeology buff, it seemed to me to be the perfect combination – seeing two ancient cultures.

I found Greece shocking.  The ruins there were, well, ruined.  The Acropolis was mostly rubble.  Archaeological sites were overrun with school children on field trips, clamoring over fallen stones, causing them to shift.  They kicked at delicate carvings and chipped stones, all under the disinterested eyes of their teachers.  At the Acropolis Museum, the caryatids looked like they were dissolving before my eyes, they had spent so many years in the polluted air and acid rain before their move to the museum.  While I support repatriation of cultural materials, in spite of my belief, I found myself thinking that it was a good thing one caryatid and the Elgin marbles are in the British Museum!

Egypt, on the other hand was truly larger than life.  I’d been reading about Egypt since I was a child.  I feared that my first glimpses of the pyramids or of the Temple of  Karnak or Abu Simbel would be a disappointment.  Instead, I found the monuments stunning in their size and in their preservation.  To see the original polychrome on the temples like Abydos – 3000 year old colors – was amazing.  To step inside Tut’s tomb and see that the colors of the frescoes were “as fresh as if they were painted yesterday” just as Carter recounted!

I was surprised at how my reactions to Greece and Egypt, places we all know so well from our history books could be so different from each other.  People often say that places we know well from photos never live up to the photographer’s art and yet here were two places I seen thousands of photos of and one was so much less than the photos for me, one was so much more.

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