The greatest mystery of the ancient world is now your opportunity to buy 10 souvenir postcards for a low, low (and negotiable) price! What's shocking about the pyramids is that the ROAD to the PARKING LOT goes right between the damn things!!! No Disneyesque well-sculpted entrance into ancient secrets here--- just the usual Cairo traffic jam, street vendors and indolent police officers..
And yet, for all the initial lack of mystique, the pyramids, with proper time and space to contemplate, are quite astonishing. From up close, the angles make them seem small. But as you get farther away, the awesome scope of them hits you. And when you're 5 miles away and still see them over the skyline-- hoo haa! We climbed inside the smaller of the two big pyramids, and entered the burial chamber, constructed of rocks bigger than two double-wide trailer homes stacked on top of each other.They certainly demand a return visit. Perhaps on a full-moon night.
Most impressive was the reconstructed "solar boat," built of 4,500 year-old cedar wood, buried for all these millennia in a limestone pit right next to the Great Pyramid. The thing is amazing.
Thanks to Josh Keiler's awesome connections, I have made friends with a whole gang of hip Cairenes- it's a real international community: a Syrian-American photographer, a beautiful Egyptian painter, a Texan guitar-playing translator with his French girlfriend, a young German diplomat and his fiery-haired Polish friend, an Egyptian drummer who owns his own pharmacy---> quite an amazing bunch, and all multi-lingual.
I tell you-- we are sheltered as hell in America. Ach, even in Jerusalem which, like South Florida, is kind of another borough of New York. But it's a big world out there, and there are a billion places to go, stories to hear, lives with which to intersect. Actually, six-point-something billion, but I was generalizing.
That's it for now. Tomorrow I go to see the mummies, then back to Sinai to reconnect with Ye Olde Lorde and Maker once again. Bism'illah.
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