101 Places Not to See Before You Die - Catherine Price [35]
After welcoming the son of God into the world, you’ll be set free to explore the rest of the park. A good first stop would be Creation—a laser show, religious lesson, and zoo exhibit rolled into one. In the beginning there is darkness, but it’s soon broken by a green light that bursts through a pinhole, dancing and shimmering as a deep, Godly voice booms in Spanish. Thunder crashes, dry land is formed, and before you know what day it is, the world’s first animals appear, rolling in on jerky wooden platforms with a sense of gravitas reminiscent of a high school play. A giraffe, an elephant, an animatronic gorilla. The show ends with the creation of Adam and Eve.
The park’s food stands offer biblical favorites like empanadas and chicken shawarma, but if you’re hoping for a last supper, you’ll have to settle for a plastic reenactment—it’s one of the park’s thirty-seven exhibits dedicated to important events in the Bible. (Some of the titles— Veronica Washes Jesus’s Face, Jesus Falls for a Third Time—make you wonder if they shouldn’t have quit while they were ahead.) The park also includes a small temple, mosque, and, for reasons that are not entirely clear, an exhibit about Mahatma Gandhi.
The Resurrection
Roberto Ettore/Wikipedia Commons
But Tierra Santa’s pièce de résistance is, of course, the resurrection—an attraction that, depending on your religious beliefs, can be breathtaking, sacrilegious, or just plain weird. Once every hour, park employees begin staring and pointing at the top of Crucifixion Mountain. As a crowd of onlookers focuses their cameras, a fifty-nine-foot-tall plastic Jesus rises up toward heaven, arms outstretched in a T. Slowly rotating, he blinks and turns his palms skyward as speakers hidden in fake palm trees blast the “Hallelujah” chorus, its triumphant melody broken only by the roar of passing planes.
Chapter 52
A Vomitorium
Here’s a bit of cocktail trivia for you: a vomitorium is not actually a room where ancient Romans went to barf.
I know. You don’t want to believe me—thanks to a misunderstanding popularized in many sixth-grade history classes, most people assume that a vomitorium is a room where Romans threw up after particularly heavy meals. This would seem to be a natural extension of other weird things the Romans did, like wear togas and speak Latin. But it’s less strange to use an inflected language than it is to build a vomit room in your house. The Romans were no strangers to gluttony, but they didn’t designate specific chambers to capture the results.
Instead, a vomitorium is an architectural term for a passageway in a theater that opens into a tier of seats. Think of the entrances in a typical sports stadium—you know, the tunnels that pop you out into the stands? Those are vomitoria. The name does share its root with vomit—both words come from the Latin verb vomere (to throw up, spew). And, depending on the event, they may very well contain nauseated fans. But the name vomitorium itself refers to the passages’ ability to quickly move spectators into the stadium. Or, more graphically, to puke them out when the show is over.
Chapter 53
Medinat al-Fayoum, Egypt, Accompanied by Your Own Security Detail
About eighty miles southwest of Cairo, Medinat al-Fayoum was once a holiday destination for thirteenth-century pharaohs; today’s highlights include lesser-known pyramids and water wheels built by ancient Greek settlers. Since Medinat al-Fayoum attracts far fewer visitors than Cairo, it offers a welcome relief from busloads of camera-toting tourists at some of Egypt’s major attractions.
However, it’s also an easy place to get paranoid. After a horrific incident in 1997 where terrorists slaughtered sixty-three tourists at an archaeological site in Luxor, a city farther south, the leaders of Medinat al-Fayoum committed themselves to making sure nothing like that ever happened