The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

It must be Austin!

We left San Antonio on Sunday, stopped at Buc Ee’s, an amazing roadside stop that may be the beef jerky capital of the world, and hit Austin.  First stop: the South Congress shopping area, where I cowboyed up, getting a pair of boots and associated accessories.  Julie and I also stopped at an open-air bar where there was some of that famous Austin live music playing, leading to one of those wonderful golden moments when you really can’t think of anywhere on earth you’d rather be, or anything else you’d rather be doing.

We then spent the whole day on Monday looking around Austin.  It started with a massage for me, then a little more shopping.  Then we went to Zilker Park, where they have an excellent botanical garden:

They also have a delightful fresh-water spring-fed pool, a huge place where Andy and I swam off the sweat from the walk through the garden:

We then caught a quick tour of the Texas Capitol.  (I’ve lived in Northern Virginia for most of my life and still haven’t visited the US Capitol, but have now visited the Texas one.  Go figure.)

After that, it was dinner.  And then, the famous Austin bat bridge!

You see, they have this bridge in Austin where, a few years back, they added expansion joints.  It turned out that those joints were just the right size to attract a huge colony of bats.  So for many months out of the year, approximately 1.5 million bats live in the Congress Street Bridge, hiding in the joints during the day from predators, coming out in a vast swarm every evening.

We took a bat cruise, which allowed us to enjoy both the bats and the beautiful skyline from Lady Bird Lake, which in some trick that I haven’t figured out, is somehow also the Colorado River.  Here’s some shots of both skyline and bats:

Then Tuesday, we dropped off Andy at the airport and hit the road again.  Where to?  Tune in next time…

It’s been a few days since I updated, due to problems with network.  That’s now corrected, so it’s time for an update.

After Dallas, Julie and I drove to San Antonio.  San Antonio held the reason for the road trip – a convention of encaustic artists.  That’s Julie’s medium of choice, so she wanted to go.  They also had an art show related to the conference, and Julie got a painting in, so we had to attend the opening.

At San Antonio, we were joined by our next road trip special guest star.

Andy decided to fly on down and join us to get a little flavor of Texas.  So we picked him up at the San Antonio airport and then, while Julie went to her encaustic convention, Andy and I saw the city.

So what did we see?

Well, there’s this old mission in San Antonio.  They had this big fight there, and a lot of people were killed.  It played an important role in Texas history.  But what was the name… hmmm… I can’t seem to…

Remember… The…

Naw, I guess I forgot.

We also spent a fair amount of time at the San Antonio Riverwalk.  San Antonio has a small river that runs through it, and they have a set of sidewalks, about ten feet below street level, that run beside the river.  At places there’s shops and restaurants, and it’s like a magic little water city that lives just below the streets above, streets that are far less magical than the river walk and, in some places, a bit rundown.  It’s a marvelous place to wander and to have a drink or a meal.

We also visited a giant tower overlooking the city (only so-so – San Antonio doesn’t have much of a skyline to justify the scenic overlook).

Then on Friday, Julie was in her conference and Andy and I drove out to the Natural Bridge caverns.  Which turned out to be a rather excellent cave:

But there’s also a great ropes course and zipline that we did – that’s Andy getting ready to walk a tightrope about fifty feet off the ground:

There was also a nearby jungle safari, where you drive through a large open area full of animals.  Which, given that one of the major reasons for this roadtrip was the fact that I just bought myself a convertible, we did with the top down.

It was a truly Texas day, in a place where the buffalo roam, the deer and the antelope play, and the sky was not cloudy all day.  Yes, I did sing to the animals – why do you ask?

I took lots of pictures, and often had the curious experience of looking through the camera snapping shots, then lowering the camera to find that the subject had gotten a whole lot closer than I realized.  Like, a foot away.

A bit disconcerting, that.

That evening, we joined Julie at the opening of her art show.  Where we were once again joined by our niece Lucy, who drove down from Dallas to attend the opening, lend support, and join us for dinner by the Riverwalk where we were serenaded by wandering mariachi bands.  Here’s a bunch of shots from that evening.

Is Andy contemplating the meaning of life, or just bored with all that art talk?

The next day, Julie was in her conference, and Andy was taking a day to wander San Antonio by himself.  So I visited some of the missions that were built three centuries ago, missions that formed the heart of San Antonio.  I found myself surprisingly moved.  While I’m not religious, this was a place where simple men went to do their best to bring God and civilization to a strange people in a land far from their homes.  I’m sure the men were not all perfect – the last few years have brought harsh evidence of just how bad a priest can be – but I believe that their efforts sanctified the places where they worked.

Here’s a modern day Franciscan monk: I bought Julie a necklace from him.

(I suspect that the placement of the light above his head is not accidental, and that he knows just where to stand when a tourist asks to take his picture.)

Then it was one last San Antonio dinner, and off to Austin and another blog post.

(And oh, if you ever find yourself in San Antonio, do yourself a favor and have dinner at Bohanan’s.  A truly amazing steakhouse – Julie and Andy agreed that it was the best steak they ever tasted, and I’m not inclined to argue the point.)

Switching this to the Great Confederate Road Trip, largely because it occurred to me that on this trip, we’ll be traveling through 10 of the 11 Confederate States, and not hitting Yankee territory at all.  And who knows – I’m thinking of doing a brief detour to Florida, just so we can be 11 for 11.

Anyway, when last heard from, we were a little east of Nashville.  We got up, avoided a huge traffic clot, and made our way west.  We stopped off at Memphis to try some Memphis Barbecue – delicious stuff, and Julie said she couldn’t make it better, which is pretty much her highest praise for a restaurant meal.  Then a quick look at the map, and what did we see – we were just a couple miles from Graceland.  So Graceland it was!

And there I am, giving my best Elvis sneer (which, now that I look at it, isn’t all that good), next to the Elvis monument near his grave.

So how was Graceland?  A little cheesy, I must admit.  Which probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise.  Of course, Julie was mostly upset that Elvis, with all his money, didn’t see fit to collect art – all the paintings in his house were either prints, or shlock.  But that’s just Julie.

Then it was on the road, several hours more driving, and we got to Dallas.  From where I write this.

Today we spent the day in Dallas.  We spent the morning visiting Dealey Plaza and the site of JFK’s assassination.  Here I am, standing on the very spot where the fatal bullet hit him, with the Texas Schoolbook Depository behind me on one side, the Grassy Knoll on the other.

Then we took our niece Lucy, who lives in Dallas, and her boyfriend Justin to lunch, followed by a trip to the Dallas Museum of Art with Lucy.  The visit was a delight: both Lucy and Justin are artists, and we got a chance to see their terrific art.

Now it’s quiet time back in the hotel before we go grab dinner, and before we hit the road again tomorrow.  Which is, of course, a story for another day.

Just time for a quick update.  After deciding that the management of Treater was not for me, I’ve quit the company.  At around the same time, Julie had an art convention she wanted to go to in Texas. So, ROAD TRIP!

We’re now somewhere a little east of Nashville, having spent all day yesterday driving west from our beach house, where we had a marvelous weekend hosting a group of good friends.  We’re hoping to get to Dallas by tonight, which will be something like 24 hours on the road in two days.  Wish us luck!

More to follow…

Been a while since one of these.  And wow – looking back on what I’ve read that I haven’t written up, it’s hard to believe it’s been quite so long.  This list is not chronological: I couldn’t recall the order I read these if I tried.  And there might be some in here that I mentioned before – my record keeping leaves much to be desired.

Ebooks on the iPad:

- The Longest War by Peter Bergen.  A history of the War on Terror.  Bergen’s got an interesting point of view.  He believes that both sides on the War on Terror misplayed it terribly.  Al Qaeda made a terrible mistake when they thought that 9/11 would cause us to pull out of the Middle East, and further made even more mistakes when they used terror tactics against other Arabs.  We, on the other hand, did terribly when we responded to 9/11 by going into Iraq and torturing, etc.  In any event, this is an excellent history of the war which, curious, was published about a week before bin Laden was killed.  If only there were a follow-up…

- Man Hunt by Peter Bergen.  And here it is!  Bergen’s history of the hunt for bin Laden, covering where bin Laden went after 9/11, how we found him, and the raid that killed him.  Also excellent.  (Bergen, by the way, is one of the only western journalists who met bin Laden, having interviewed him for CNN in the late 90’s.)

- For the Win by Cory Doctorow.  What would happen if all the gold farmers in all the online RPG’s went on strike?  A fascinating book aimed at young adults in which Doctorow teaches a lot about globalization and economics in a terrific story.  Also, an interesting companion piece to Stephenson’s Reamde, which covers much of the same ground.

- Epigenetics by Richard Francis.  Epigenetics is the science that studies how one goes from a genetic code represented by DNA to create us.  Lots of interesting things in this book, much of which has personal relevance as it covers the ways in which twins can be vastly different in spite of sharing the same DNA.  Plus, some things about epigenetics made me think about the abortion issue in a new way.

- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.  I first came across the science of cognitive biases, which studies the ways in which we typically make mistakes in our thinking, when I worked for a short while at a lab at George Washington University in the early 90’s.  That field was founded by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two psych researchers.  I found their work fascinating.  Now Kahneman, who since won a Nobel Prize for the work (Tversky did not share the prize as he had died some years before), has written a book about it.  It’s one of those books that is likely to change my life.  It covers how we often act irrationally, and is full of fascinating and disturbing facts.  For example: judges are more likely to give more lenient sentences and grant parole to prisoners whose cases they review soon after eating.  Which seems just wrong.  Anyway, strongly recommended.

- The Righeous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics, by Jonathan Haidt.  My son Andy recommended this one.  He knows Haidt, a psych professor at UVA.  It was a good recommendation.  This makes an interesting companion piece to the Kahneman book.  It covers the field of moral psychology, or how our minds determine what is right and wrong.  As such, it covers much of the same ground as Kahneman, discussing how irrationality affects our moral judgments.  Haidt’s view is that there are differences between how conservatives and liberals make moral choices, but both approaches have valid aspects and are valuable.  An interesting read.

- End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman.  I’ve been reading Krugman’s articles and blog posts on the economy for several years now, and I’m generally convinced by his point of view.  I enjoyed this book, but it does seem to be a bit over-simplified at some points, and a bit lacking in specifics of what our policies should be.

- Redshirts by John Scalzi.  An excellent idea – it looks at life on a ship much like the USS Enterprise from the perspective of the redshirted minions whose only purpose seems to be to die showing what the monsters do.  In execution, not as good.  The characters are largely cardboard, the plot not quite involved and twisty enough.  But fun anyway.

–The Hunger Games Trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay) by Suzanne Collins.  I really loved these.  The central character is fascinating both in her strengths and her flaws, the anti-war message is well presented, and the story itself is compelling.  These books have been a huge success, and they did not disappoint me.  (Note: while usually I use the iBooks interface on the iPad, I read these with the Kindle interface as they were not available for iBooks.  I much prefer the iBooks interface, which I find to be much more elegant.)

And Audiobooks:

- Bring up the Bodies by Hillary Mantel.  I loved Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which I listened to on Audibook a few years ago.  This is the sequel, and I loved it as much.  It’s the story of the trial of Anne Boleyn, from the perspective of her major persecutor, Thomas Cromwell.  Cromwell is a fascinating character as presented by Mantel, and her prose is a delight.  I can’t recommend these enough.

- Boneshaker by Cherie Priest.  Steampunk with zombies set in the Seattle underground.  Need I say more?  Fun stuff, not terribly profound, a nice way to while away the commuting hours.

–  Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff.  What a fascinating person was the Queen of the Nile!  A nice biography.  Special bonus for me: when Cleopatra took Julius Caesar on a tour of Egypt, they visited many of the sites that Julie and I visited last year.  It was exceedingly cool to see these sites from the perspective of Cleopatra.

– D-Day by Antony Beevor.  A history of the D-Day invasion, the Normandy Campaign, and the liberation of Paris, all in WWII.  Good stuff.

- Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.  Somehow I managed to never read this before.  I absolutely do not believe Card’s depiction of small children – had Ender started the book at 12 and not 6, I might have bought it, but not as it is.  Other than that, I enjoyed the book.

- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.  Another one that I managed to not read before.  I liked it with a whole lot of caveats.  The violence against women did not make for good reading, and having a prickly young girl drop into bed with the first author-surrogate that she encounters was a bit much.

- Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.  Yeah, I read this one before.  Nice little audio-book experience, though.

- 11/22/63 by Stephen King.  A nice little love story wrapped up in a time travel yarn.  The time travel stuff and the stalking of Lee Harvey Oswald droned on a bit, but the love story was nice.

Hello to everyone who has gotten here because of my Artomatic exhibit.  The pictures in the exhibit are photos that I took on a trip to Egypt in October, 2011.  If you scroll down through this blog, you’ll see several entries describing that trip, including the pictures that are up in the exhibit.  In several cases, there’s descriptions of how and where those pictures were taken.  Please feel free to leave a comment on any of these.  Or if you want to reach me, drop me an email at jdzik@aol.com.

And here’s my wife Julie’s page.  She has the wall across from mine.

http://gallerydz.com/

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, hello to all of my regular readers.  Artomatic is a huge and very cool art event in the Washington area that has run for several years now.  You can find details here: http://artomatic.org/.

Artomatic is always held in a large empty building somewhere in the Washington area.  This year it’s in an 11 story building in Crystal City, Virginia.  Anyone who wishes, for a nominal fee and a total of fifteen hours of volunteer labor, can get a stretch of wall or a small room to display art.  The show runs for a little over a month, tens of thousands of people visit, and over a thousand artists have work on display.

It’s a terrific event.  Because anyone can exhibit, the quality and type of art varies widely.  Along one wall you might find some terrific landscape paintings, while the next room contains a large abstract sculpture made of welded iron and neon lights, and the next wall over can have someone’s finger paintings or a conceptual piece that invites passersby to use sharpies to draw on a collaborative mural.  It’s tons of fun – kind of like a giant science fair of art.

Julie participated in the last one, held in 2009.  This year, she persuaded me to join and exhibit some of my photos.  I did an exhibit of 14 of my favorite pictures from Egypt called “Faces of Egypt,” using photos that have appeared in this blog, focusing on photos that show the faces of Egyptians that we encountered.  I painted the wall with a pyramid motif, hung the photos over my makeshift mural, and set up some lights to brighten it up.  I’ll post a picture of the installation sometime soon.

If you should find yourself in the DC area in the next month, I strongly recommend a visit to Artomatic.  It’s lots of fun for both adults and kids.  They even have several performing artists, though since the performers are all random sign-ups the quality there is widely varying also.

And if you do go, then by all means stop by and see my exhibit.  It’s on the fourth floor – go into the office space across the corridor from the men’s room, wander around a bit, and look for the pyramid and you’ll find me.  Julie’s work is hanging right across the hall, so you can get two Dzikiewicz’s for the price of one.  We’re planning on being there on Meet the Artist night on June 2, but if you’re there and we’re not, leave a note in my notebook near the exhibit.  I’ll try to take some photos of my favorite things at Artomatic to post here later on.

As the title says, it’s been a while since I’ve updated my reading list.  Lot of books on Egypt in here, books that I read in preparation for the trip.  Some other stuff too.  Here goes!

Audiobooks:

– Star Island, by Carl Hiaasen.  I like Hiaasen’s satires, all set in Florida, including a set of crazy characters.  This one centers around a Britney/Lindsey type of teen-star well on her way to meltdown.  Not one of his best, but still entertaining.

– Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis.  Time travel books about two future historians sent back in time to discover more about the London Blitz during WWII and what happens when their time machine fails.  At turns entertaining and annoying – the book spends way too long having our three intrepid heroes find each other, and when they are concentrating on their own troubles it gets rather tedious.  Still, when the characters start thinking beyond themselves, it’s entertaining.  And some of the scenes, such as the extended sequence the night that St Paul’s Cathedral almost burned down, can be riveting.

– The Curse of the Pharaohs and The Mummy Case by Elizabeth Peters.  These are two books from a series of mysteries about Amelia Peabody, an archaeologist working in Egypt from the 1880’s on.  Peabody is a delightful character: opinionated, strong willed, outspoken, and prone to encountering murders and other crimes during the digs that she and her husband Emerson carry out.  Definitely fun books, much enhanced by the fact that Peabody spends much time at sites that Julie and I visited in Egypt.

– To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert Heinlein.  Heinlein’s last book.  Alas, not one of his best.

E-books on the iPad:

– A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin.  The latest book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, inspiration to the HBO series “Game of Thrones.”  Honestly, I thought this one was weak.  A whole lot of characters traveling around not doing much.  Nothing really resolved from the last book.  One character spent the whole book traveling across half the country, got where he was going, opened a door, and was brutally killed.  I’m not at the point yet of giving up on this series, but I’m getting close.

– Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi.  Back around 50 years ago, a science fiction writer named H. Beam Piper wrote a book called Little Fuzzy about what happens when a new intelligent race is discovered on a corporation-owned colony planet.  I read and enjoyed that book back in the 70’s.  Now Scalzi has done a reboot of it.  I enjoyed the book, though not as much as I did the original.  And everyone is a bit darker than in the original, up to and including the Fuzzies themselves.

– Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters.  The first of the Amelia Peabody books, referenced under audiobooks.  Lots of fun.

– Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs and Red Land, Black Land by Barbara Mertz.  You know Elizabeth Peters, author of the Amelia Peabody books?  Well, it turns out that she has a PhD in Egyptology.  Further, she’s written two books on the history of ancient Egypt under her real name, Barbara Mertz.  And here they are.  Both excellent reads, wonderfully entertaining, showing Mertz’s strong opinions (I have to think that she based Amelia Peabody on herself).  If you’re interested in learning something about Egyptian history, I recommend these strongly.  Temple, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs is a chronological history that covers the political events of Egypt from its unification down through the conquest by the Romans.  Red Land, Black Land is a social history that describes how Egyptians lived during ancient times.  Both are marvelous.

– Fort Freak, edited by George RR Martin.  The latest in the Wildcards series about people having superpowers in the real world.  A fun read, but nothing profound here.

– Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie.  One of Christie’s classics, a Hercule Poirot murder mystery that mostly takes place on a cruise down the Nile.  I found the crime, involving as it did no less than three different people who went into the victim’s stateroom for one reason or other, two of whom were spotted by others who did not reveal what they saw for various reasons, to be a bit contrived, put there only to make the mystery more of a puzzle.  Plus I didn’t solve the mystery before the big reveal, so I’ve got some sour grapes going on there as well.  Okay if you like this kind of stuff, but not really my thing.

– Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie.  In a hole in a tomb in Egypt they once found a series of papyrus letters from a father to his son.  The father was a minor official who often had to travel, and he sent directions to his son who managed the family homestead in the father’s absence.  The letters contained descriptions of the family, including three sons, the responsible one, his fiery-tempered younger brother, and the youngest, the apple of the father’s eye and a bit spoiled, a young widow daughter, an aunt who no one liked but the father, and others.  At one point, the father wrote that he had just acquired a young and beautiful concubine and he would be bringing her home soon.

Agatha Christie heard about these letters and decided to write a mystery about the family.  This is that mystery.  A murder takes place in a fictionalized version of this family, and complications ensue.  Still more of the Christie-style puzzle-book, but I enjoyed this one a lot more for the setting in ancient Egypt and the back-story related to the letters.  I figured out whodunnit in this one, though given that at one point or other I suspected more of the members of the family, that’s not much to brag about.

– Akhenaten by Naguib Mahfouz.  After studying Egypt, my favorite pharaoh was Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh, father of Tutankhamun and husband to Nefertiti, who founded the world’s first monotheist religion and who revolutionized Egypt’s art.  Of course, Akhenaten tends to be the favorite pharaoh of many.  One person who was intrigued by him was Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who wrote a fictionalized account of Akhenaten’s reign.  An interesting book, which tells the tale of Akhenaten from the point of view of many of the people who knew him.  A nice take on a fascinating story.

– Reamde by Neal Stephenson.  I like Neal Stephenson: his Cryptonomicon was one of my most entertaining reads of the last decade. With Reamde he gets back to his roots: hackers and world girdling action-adventure full of outlandish characters and great action sequences.  A lot of fun.

And last but not least: paper books.

– The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt by Ian Shaw.  A history of Egypt, focusing largely on the archaeological evidence.  Rather dry, I’m afraid.  Lots of detail, if you can keep awake, but if you’re looking for an entertaining history, stick to Mertz.

– How to Read Egyptian by Mark Collier and Bill Manley.  Early in the summer, I had visions of learning to read hieroglyphs for the Egypt trip.  This was the book that cured me of that delusion.  While I learned my way around hieroglyphs and can recognize a few phrases and the names of pharaohs, I doubt I’ll ever learn the entire language.  Still, this was a nice book to work through, if you want a little education in the language.

– A Brief History of Egypt by Arthur Goldschmidt Jr.  A survey of the entire history of Egypt, from the days of the pharaohs through Mubarak’s rule.  I read this one to get a view of more recent Egyptian history, where “more recent” means the last two millennia.  This book gave me what I was looking for, and was a quick read.

– Look I Made a Hat by Stephen Sondheim.  I’m a huge fan of Sondheim’s musicals.  So when he came out last year with a collected lyrics of his shows through 1980, complete with his stories of how those shows were produced, comments on how to write lyrics, and his views of the top lyricists from Broadway history, I was thrilled.  I loved that book, and I loved this one, the sequel that covers the work he’s done since 1980.  Not to be missed, if you’re as much of a Sondheim fan as I am.

– Various other books on Egypt.  I skimmed parts of a number of books on Egyptian history in preparation for the trip, but didn’t finish any of them.

Egypt is serious about their tourism.  As they probably should be – it’s been a tourist destination for a very long time.  After all, Herodotus wrote what might have been the first tourism book about Egypt many many years ago.

Nowadays, they have a special police force that handles tourist issues.  Here’s one of their cars, as seen at Saqqara.

We even had a guard traveling with us whenever we were in Cairo.  Each day a man would be on the bus wearing a suit with a suspicious firearm-shaped bulge.  You can see a rather serious gun peeking out from under this guy’s jacket.

(Almost universally, the Egyptians that I met seemed to like having their picture taken.  You can see this by all the smiles in all the pictures you’ve seen in these past few posts.)

They even have a special emergency phone number for the Tourism Police.  It’s 122 for the normal police, 126 if you happen to be a tourist.

I’m not sure if all that protection makes me feel safer or more at risk!

I’ve been meaning to put this up for a while, but life has been busy.  I’ve gone from a summer with no job to a fall with three.  That said, here’s a picture-only post: faces of people that I encountered in various ways in Egypt, some of which have been posted here previously.  Plus some towel animals, because I like them and this is my blog.

When I first arranged this tour, there was one thing missing from the itinerary that I really wanted to do.  I wanted to go into the Great Pyramid.  I knew that it was possible, but the tour company told me that the only way I could do it was to skip Khufu’s boat, and I didn’t want to miss that.

As it happens, there was another way I could arrange it: by staying an extra day.  So I persuaded Julie to extend our trip one day past the scheduled tour end, something that the tour company was happy to arrange, found a couple other things worth doing to fill out the day, and was happy to know that I would get to visit Khufu’s burial chamber.

Today was that last day.  Everyone else on the tour departed for the airport early this morning, and Julie and I had at our sole disposal the most excellent Karima, a car, and a driver.

There were only two problems: we were told that going into the Great Pyramid wasn’t a big deal, and there were too many things at the Egyptian Museum to see in the two and a half hours we had yesterday.  So I didn’t end up going into the Great Pyramid after all.  Good thing there was plenty of other good stuff to do, including another pyramid to enter.

Our last morning before departure started with me taking pictures from our balcony.  Here’s one of my favorites:

Then we were off.  We passed through lovely fields of date palms ready for harvest.

Then we reached Dahshur.  Which means it’s time for another history lesson.

A century or so after Imhotep invented the Step Pyramid, King Snefru came to the throne.  He too wanted something different for a tomb, so his architects came up with the idea of taking the Step Pyramid model, smoothing out the sides, and facing the whole thing with high quality limestone.  The result was the first true pyramid, which stands now at Dahshur, about a half-hour drive from Giza.

Except, you may note, there’s something wrong with that picture.  It doesn’t have the constant slope that one expects of a pyramid.  In fact, that pyramid looks rather bent.  Which is why it’s now called the Bent Pyramid.

Snefru’s engineers were clearly not up to Imhotep’s standard.  It’s believed that they started working on the pyramid and then discovered that they couldn’t continue at the same slope, so they had to change the angle.  Leaving Snefru with a substandard tomb.   Chalk it up as one of the perils of being an early adopter.

Imagine having to be the guy who comes to the king to tell him of the mistake that was made.  It’s a good thing that Snefru was, according to legend, an awfully pleasant king, because telling something like that to Rameses would probably have involved some serious head bashing.

But even a nice king has limits.  So Snefru ordered up another pyramid built, call it Pyramid 2.0, the Red Pyramid, so-called because it’s made of a reddish granite.  It’s not far from the Bent Pyramid.

This is actually the second-tallest pyramid in Egypt, after the Great Pyramid.  Finally, the builders had produced an ideal pyramid.  It only remained for Snefru’s son, Khufu, to perfect the design with the Great Pyramid, or what I think of as version 3.0.

Our visit to Dahshur was marvelous.  Unlike Giza, there’s precious few tourists, and no vendors at all.  Which made our walk around the Bent Pyramid rather like it must have been back in the day: a walk in the desert, all alone, with only pyramids for company.

It was interesting to see the differences between these pyramids and the Great Pyramid.  The most obvious difference is the angle.  But the Bent Pyramid also retains more of its smooth limestone facing than any other pyramid.  Which means that most of it has a smooth surface.

Further, the Bent Pyramid was made out of smaller stones, something that’s obvious in the areas that have lost their facing.

It was a rather windy day, though, as Julie discovered when her hat blew away.

(That strange looking structure in the distance is another of the decayed mud-brick pyramids built by later generations.)

I’m happy to report that Julie caught her hat in time to have a pleasant conversation with Karima.

After that, we drove to the Red Pyramid where we had an opportunity to enter the burial chamber.  This required going down a 200-foot-long steeply angled corridor that was around four foot high, something that I found a bit challenging.

(Great, now there’s a picture of my underwear on the Internet.  Oh well, I suppose that hardly makes me unique.)

Down at the bottom, there’s a series of rooms joined by short corridors.  And by short, I refer to both height and distance.

Then you get to the burial chamber, which I’m happy to report has a much higher ceiling.

So I got to go into a pyramid after all!

After Dahshour, we visited a papyrus factory to see how papyrus is made and make a few purchases.  Then it was an excellent lunch, and then we went back to the Egyptian Museum and saw many of the things we missed yesterday, a visit improved by the small afternoon crowds.

Here’s a picture of the outside of the museum that shows where ancient and modern history almost collided in a disastrous way:

The building in the foreground is the Egyptian Museum.  The burnt-out building in the backgrounds is the former headquarters of the National Democratic Party, or NDP, Mubarak’s political party.  During the revolution, police snipers were firing on the crowd from the upper stories of the NDP building.  So the revolutionaries lit it on fire.  Happily, the fire did not spread to the Egyptian Museum, which stands next door.

After that, we headed back to the Giza Pyramids for a light show.  The Pyramids look good under the light, even though the lasers can have a distinctly cheesy effect.

The green pharaoh’s face is projected onto the Sphinx, by the way.

And so ended our last day in Egypt.  This has been an amazing trip.  Look here in a few days for a series of wrap-up posts, posts that shall be written back in cooler, wetter Virginia.