Actually there were no dead Egyptians, coffins yes, but no dead Egyptians.

Open coffin showing interior design

The National Gallery of Victoria had partnered with the British Museum to bring a collection of ancient Egyptian monumental sculpture and some other artefacts to its winter exhibition in Melbourne, and we decided on a day trip to the city to see the exhibition.

So, up before the sun at 0515 for showers, tea and toast, not to mention some cat feeding, before driving down to Wangaratta to catch the morning train to Melbourne.

It was school holidays meaning that the train was more than usually busy. and as always V/Line was incapable of producing any kind of hot drink, be it coffee tea or something else, but at least this time they had an operating buffet on the train.

Somewhere south of Seymour the train stopped in a passing loop where the single standard gauge track parallels the double tracked broad gauge line to Shepparton to let the northbound and late XPT through, something that made us around ten minutes late into Southern Cross.

No matter, we still had plenty of time and hopped on a local Metro train to Flinders Street from where we walked up to Cafe Andiamo in de Graves Street for brunch before hopping on a tram down to the gallery.

It was a wet day, and that coupled with it being school holidays meant that the exhibition was crowded with bored teenagers sent out for a cultural experience instagramming each other and taking selfies, but we managed to see most of what we wanted without too much difficulty.

All in all I was slightly disappointed in the exhiibition, I’d hoped for more artefacts depicting everyday life – after all even the Pharoah of Egypt wore woolly socks with his thongs on a chilly winter night – but the curators had decided to concentrate on the monumental, which I always find sightly dehumanising.

Equally, there was no real historical narrative to the exhibition so artefacts from the Ptolemaic (Greek) period and a rather fine drawing of Tiberius as Pharoah were displayed without any real explanation.

However, as always, Melbourne is a long way from Egypt, or indeed any of the great European collections of Egyptian artefacts and it was good to be able to see a range of pieces.

Afterwards we nipped upstairs to have a look at the Gandara art from the quasi Greek kingdoms in Afghanistan with very Greek looking representations of the Bhudda, and then down to the NGV annexe on Federation Square, before a little shopping and catching the train home.

The train home leaves at 1802, making dinner a problem – V/Line’s catering is notoriously erratic, and we get back too late to sensibly eat dinner. Sometimes we have something at a cafe before leaving, other times we’ve bought sandwiches from the Woolworths Metro in the station and eaten on the train.

This time we ate before we left at the newly opened Mercato Centrale Italian themed food court just down from the station which offered the chance for a slice of pizza, a glass of wine and an expresso lungo before heading home, which made for a civilised end to what had been a long trip