The Giza Plateau

On Monday morning, I toured the Giza Plateau, which is home to the three Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx. I promise to write more about the brief journey out to the only surviving wonder of the world, but time's short right this minute, and the pictures speak for themselves.

In brief, the pyramids are staggering. They are bigger than I imagined, and from up close they induce a slight feeling of nausea. Viewing the pyramids from a few feet away vs. viewing them from several hundred meters away is akin to viewing one of Seurat's paintings from up close and from a distance—the magic is in the perception.

The government has undertaken measures to reduce the amount of hawkers at the pyramid site itself. We arrived early in the morning, and when we left at about noon there still weren't many around. Some of the cities poorest neighborhoods run right up to the Giza Plateau, and the city lies under a blanket of smog when viewed from above. It's sad—our guide, an Egyptologist at AUC, who's only about 35, said that when she was a teenager one could see the city clearly, under blue skies, any day of the week. Those days are gone, but perhaps they will return. The pyramids have outlasted scavenging treasure hunters, sandblasting by powerful desert winds, and millenniums worth of gravitational pull. Something tells me they might outlast this iteration of the City of Sand as well.

In these photos, you'll see an altercation between an older hawker and a younger hawker that resulted in the younger one receiving blows. That is not the Ramadan spirit.

I got a kick out of the Joan Collins character that got caught in the middle.