The Mythical Scroll cont'd
Part Three
Our first full day in New York!! Large museums are intimidating and I often avoid them. We decided to see just a tiny part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art ... a show of only 30 articles ... Tibetan Armor. It was a sentimental draw.
Once inside that magnificent place, we were pulled here and there by all that stuff.
We zeroed in on the Tibetan pieces first. Two saddles, horse bridles, even arrow quivers, beautifully created with turquoise and gems, with many Buddhist symbols.
One silk saddle even belonged to an adviser and friend of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
From there, I got caught up reading about the Byzantine Empire and gazing at the artifacts from that time. I just had no idea how vast the era was and how in some ways it imposed Western religion on traditional Middle Eastern peoples. It was also a time of great creativity, until the icons were destroyed out of a misguided sense of idol-worshipping.
Greg wanted to see the displays of Egyptian relics and when we got to that wing, we stepped back thousands of years.
We spent some time inside a tomb, learning about the Western wall and the "false door" the Egyptians believe would allow spirits to communicate with the living. Offerings were left at these recessed places, created to resemble doors.
We wandered on and eventually came upon hundreds of scarabs ... gazed at those mysterious stone tokens ... and stumbled upon a display of sarcophagi and real mummies.
About four and a half hours later, we emerged, brains overloaded, into an unseasonably warm New York day.
We bought (very expensive) sandwiches at an east side deli and went to Central Park, where we ate lunch at the pond and hoped to see the resident hawk.
Later, walking through John Lennon's "Strawberry Fields" not far from the building where he once lived, a female hawk descended to a branch not far overhead.
TOMORROW: The scroll at last!
