The Double Blond Affair~chapter 4~ "A Touring We will Go..."

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link to chapter 3: http://section7mfu.livejournal.com/195990.html

The next morning, he excused himself from the amorous arms of the young lady he'd spent the night with, finding out her name was Shirley.  It had been a wonderful evening, and was one that was completely unexpected.

He’d always fancied himself a bit of a ladies man, and here there were beautiful women, ripe for the picking but he could focus on that later as there were places to go and things to do.

Shirley offered to meet him for lunch but he declined. His intent was to head to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as he heard they had a rather extensive  ancient Egyptian art collection.

As he climbed the museum steps, he was in awe of the Corinthian columns that were part of the facade. It seemed like a completed structure at first glance, but looking closer, he saw what looked like piles of stone blocks at the tops of the columns. He was told they were placed there during construction, around the turn of the 20th century, and were supposed to have been carved into sculptures representing music, architecture, painting and ironically sculpture, but instead these stones for 94 years, un-carved and virtually ignored, technically leaving the building unfinished.


He wandered from gallery to gallery, stopping to admire the many pieces collected by the museum; alabaster canopic jars, sarcophagi, statuary and jewelry and even reconstructed temple and tomb entrances. The collection was astounding, so much so that he made a mental note to visit the middle east one day, see the pyramids and perhaps get involved in an archaeological dig, just for a bit of fun. There were so many things in the world that interested him...

As he sat on a marble bench to admire a beautifully carved stelae and brightly painted 'fresco a secco' in Italian, dating from the Middle Kingdom, he couldn’t help noticing a man out of the corner of his eye.  The fellow seemed to be popping up in every gallery he’d gone to, and it suddenly occurred to him, the cheeky fellow might be following him.

He’d been warned about being careful not to get mugged while in New York.  Could it be the man was sizing him up as a potential victim? His military training in hand-to- hand combat quickly came to mind, though as a physician he’d never thought he might need it.