Red Squares and Beige Pyramids

I have realized that I am way overdue on writing about my adventures to Moscow and Cairo. I, in fact, just wrote another blog post but do not feel right posting it until I have done justice to my grand adventure, so I will post it in a few days.

My first feeling after returning from Moscow and Egypt is that the world is smaller than I thought. I didn't conclude this because I travelled around the world so quickly, but because larger than life monuments were dwarfed when I encountered them in real life. I suppose I should have realized that things aren't enormous just because I've grown up seeing pictures of them. Both St. Basil's and the Sphinx were much smaller than I thought they would be. Red Square, the touted "largest square in the world" didn't seem as large as I thought it should be either.

My second feeling was disappointment. Not because I didn't have a great time despite the food poisoning I suffered in Cairo, but because my trip seriously lacked old dead bodies. Lenin was "closed for inventory" during my week in Moscow. How does inventory on Lenin take a week? I imagine the process should go as follows:

"One dead communist?"

" Check."

The end.

I was also disappointed by the mummy room in the Egyptian museum. It costs extra money to enter the mummy room, but when we entered, the room was very crowded and the patrons did not move around with any apparent logic or order. I should think the directors of the mummy room could take the 50 pound entrance fee I paid to buy some velvet ropes or hire someone to stagger patrons' entrances. When I managed to push myself in front of the mummies, they were slightly disappointing. None of the mummies' bodies are unwrapped and some are entirely covered. I realize they have to preserve the mummies, but it's pretty pathetic that the shock value of the Hermitage's Egyptian mummy beats the Egyptian Museum's by a long shot. However, staring at one mummy's potato chip-like ear was enough to make me queasy and exit the mummy room a bit sooner than Pat did.

My third feeling was happiness that haggling doesn't exist in America and that people can't legally sell stuff on the streets without a license. I didn't do very much souvenir shopping just because I hate shopping without marked prices. However, my dreams were soon crushed when I returned to Peter to discover that America's Best Buy is implementing a new Haggle-Welcome policy. First the declining dollar, and now the downfall of clearly set prices? What is my beloved capitalist economy coming to?