The Great Museum Caper

I am a great lover of museums. Put some stuff on a wall and light it, and I am there. Art, old stuff, whatever. I love it. Give me more. So, with my indiscriminate appreciation of the museum combined with the apparent plethora of museums relating to my passions, I have been to some wonderful galleries in the past few months. Somehow, I have neglected to write about it at all. So, in chronologically order:

The Indian Agricultural Museum
I literally walked into the Indian Agricultural Museum without knowing it. I was looking for the offices of an organization I was doing research with in a complex of buildings in Delhi and I walked in the front door. The guard seemed just about as shocked that I was there as I was. Due to its rather out of the way location and relatively uninteresting subject matter (how can it even begin to compete with the International Toilet Museum, also in New Delhi??), I got the feeling that this museum was not getting a lot of visitors - which is a shame - because it was actually a really well done and interesting museum.

It took some convincing to get the guard to allow me to leave for my meeting (I think he was afraid I would never come back) but when I returned afterwards, I did some nice browsing. Sadly, photos were not allowed, so I didn't get to record much of anything. The museum included good explanations about how Indians have been farming since the start of time to present with cute displays, good historical analysis of the British occupation, cultural significances of various harvests and accompanying festivals, and even thorough but understandable explanations about how various biological processes occur. A bonus was a good deal of stuff from a somewhat varied viewpoint on the Green Revolution. It was great.

La Maison du Pain
After my time in Paris, I took off to see a little bit of the rest of France. Specifically, I took off to see two regions - Alsace and Lyon. Alsace for its German influence and, less so - but more importantly for me - its bread museum. In the little town of Selstat, there is a living house of pain (museum of bread) which tells the history of bread, describes and demonstrates how and bread is made and has been made for the past couple of centuries, and gives some pretty awful tasters of French breads. The primary thing I learned there was that I could have saved myself a lot of time and rather learning than 'experientially' and working in a bakery and talking with folks for two months, I could have just gone to this museum for an afternoon. But that wouldn't have been nearly as fun or tasty. Right?

The Egyptian Agricultural Museum
This is how museums should be. The Egyptian Agricultural Museum was just every perfect thing for an old, post-colonial museum about a subject few people go to museums for. So, the approach for this museum is walking through urban Cairo, under a couple overpasses, I come upon the road where the museum should be. The road is covered with sand, broken tile, and rubbish - it looks like it is the set of a bad post-apocalyptic movie. After getting reassurances from the old man selling apricots on the curb that I was indeed heading in the right direction, I pass through some gates, dodge some taxis, and I finally get to the booth to buy my tickets. Price of admission? Two cents. Yeah.

The buildings were from the 1930s, but the displays all had their most recent entries for data listed as 1971. They had stuffed birds unlabeled and piled in glass cases with heaps of moth balls, making the smell whole thing near unbearable. As is relatively customary in Egypt, the way you see the good stuff is by paying baksheesh (a sort of combined tip and bribe) to the guards. The guard who came upon me decided I would want my picture taken with various mannequins around the museum, and as he didn't speak any English, that's what happened. When I eventually indicated I wanted to see the rooms which were on nutrition and soil (soil had a padlock on its door, nutrition literally had a board nailed across the double doors - but I could see through the cracks in both that exhibits still existed), he simply laughed, and told me no. Then asked for more money.

The museum had an enormous collection of traditional breads (which, eerily, had not rotted, but had made their cases have foggy glass) and a good section on various types of grain which are grown and/or consumed in the country. Sadly, much of the museum was in Arabic only, so I didn't understand near as much as I would have liked, but it was still nice. Big halls of dead stuff, curious displays of plants, and lots of miniatures of things to make food with. Lighting was poor, smells were a lesson in themselves, and everything was jumbled, but it was still a winner to me - especially for the end price (including baksheesh to three guards) being a dollar - and two cents.