Diorama of a buffalo jump: "Hunters herded the bison and drove them over the cliff, breaking their legs and rendering them immobile. Tribe members waiting below closed in with spears and bows to finish the kills. The Blackfeet Indians called the buffalo jumps "pishkun", which loosely translates as "deep blood kettle"
The also have a great collection of other artifacts used to induce altered states, like this rattle.
" Like a shaman's drum, the rattle is used to aid in achieving the "altered state of consciousness," that brainwave frequency measured between 7-8 Hz which is the threshold to journey work, reportedly in the Theta/Alpha range. That is roughly the same as the Earth's natural frequency, known as part of the Schumann Frequency range..."
Pride goeth before the fall! As I was on my way walking out of the museum, literally 50 feet away from leaving, I turned around right in the middle of this huge room to take a picture of the awesome hugeness of these statues, and a guard appeared from behind a column (Indiana Jones style) stopped me and told me "Very bad. Very serious." OH SHIT.
He motioned for me to follow him to a doorway, which led to an empty hallway and then told me "Now you must wait here with me." Even though I was in the midst of assuming the worst, I knew that no matter what happened, I'd definitely have time to take the mummy memory card, chew it up and swallow it if I had to. And then I realized that being "detained" in the hallway didn't seem to make much sense so I decided to "go for it."
By going for it, I mean that I decided to do the Internation hand sign for "How about a nice big bribe and we can forget all about this?" by rubbing my thumb and my two forefingers together whilst simultaneously raising and lowering my eyebrows rapidly. He immediately recognized my gesture and countered with a gesture that I easily interpreted as "Sure, but it had better be a good one because I know you've probably got mummy photos on you."
I tried to venture a peek in my pocket without letting him see what I had (no easy task when you're dealing with money you've never seen before!). I quickly realized that I only had two bills on me! The first bill was a 25 Egyptian Pound note (about $4.50 USD) the other bill was twenty dollar bill! I decided it was better to be safe than sorry, folded up the twenty, and slipped it into his hand.
He tried to hide his smile and tried his best to play-off my subtle hand off with that look that everyone gets when they're like "Holy moly, this is just like a secret agent movie!" Just before he slipped the bill in his pocket, he couldn't resist a peek and glanced down at the bill. His eyes instantly got huge and he did a what looked like a vaudeville double-take. For a split second I thought I'd totally messed up, but then I realized that I just dropped a MONSTER bribe on him and he was intent on hustling me out of there before someone else got wind of the major jackpot he'd just hit. Hahahaha.
We quickly parted ways. I half-jogged my way to the exit smiling. I knew right then and there that me and Egypt were going to get along just fine.
I'd already taken the extra precaution of putting in a brand new memory card and hiding the tiny memory card with all the mummy photos in a sneaky pocket sewn into my pants, so I wasn't really worried.
After spending a long time marveling at the mummies, I went back out into the rest of the museum (because there's SO MUCH TO SEE). The museum was getting ready to close and there weren't many people around, so I didn't even bother to hide the fact that I was taking photos.
There are signs posted all inside the museum that say "No Photos", but considering they let me walk right into the museum with my camera in my hand, I figured it was probably no big deal to snap a few pics. (I'm not gonnna go crazy in there, but otherwise, how the heck am I supposed to remember the stuff I liked that I saw?)
Anyway, I snapped a bunch of pics and didn't make an effort to hide what I was doing and nobody looked twice. After walking around the museum for a while, I leaned that you could pay extra to enter the Royal Mummy Room and see 27 royal mummies!
As I bought my ticket to see the mummies, it became clear the relatively laissez faire approach to security in the rest of the museum did not apply to the ROYAL MUMMIES section. Security was TIGHT inside...
...which made it all the more fun to see how many sneaky mummy photos I could take without going to Egyptian jail! (I'm really good at taking sneaky pics - I can basically take pics like this with the camera inside my pocket!).
I took a ninety minute nap and woke up feeling so refreshed that I decided to get right on with my sightseeing and set out to find my way to the insanely famous Museum of Egyptian Antiquities from my hotel on foot!
The museum is filled with all sorts of really old Buddhist art where you can see the original Indian representations before the Thais developed their own distinct representations of the Buddha.
