Our Trip to Cairo - A Morning in Giza

Our first morning in Egypt was spent at Giza the site of the three largest of the pyramids. Apparently there are over a hundred pyramids in Egypt - these at Giza are the biggest and among the oldest. Eventually the pharoahs stopped wanting pyramids because they were basically an advertisement to graverobbers "there is a lot of gold here!"

Here's me in front of the pyramid of Cheops the biggest - and you can get a sense of the size of the stone blocks by the people along side of them.

In the pyramids' prime they were covered in limestone so they were smooth rather than looking like steps


Giza is genuinely a suburb of Cairo and its one of those suburbs like Arlington or Evanston that are right next to the city so you can't tell where one begins and the other ends. In Giza however the suburb then suddenly ends and there are pyramids. While National Geographic takes pictures that make you think the pyramids are in the middle of nowhere - they aren't and this city skyline was taken from the pyramids.
The other thing about Giza that is weird is that it is spelled with a letter that in the Jordanian dialect is pronounced "J" - so as we were driving to Giza and I was reading the street signs I kept seeing "Jeeza" and wondering what that was.

Here is Dan in my attempt at the NatGeo shot where we and the pyramids are near nothing. In fact we were surrounded by hundreds of tourists - most of them from Europe but some from Asia and America too.