Da Moose Does Da Pyramids With Friends

Paddi came to visit us again this winter from Canada and while she was here she decided to take the grooms at Maryanne's farm to the Pyramids at Giza. They had grown up only a few miles from the pyramids but had never actually visited them! Amazing! But Maryanne said that lots of people grow up near famous places and never visit them. Anyway, we all took a trip to the pyramids, Da Moose, Minnie Moose, and Al Camel, a friend that Paddi decided should come home with her to Canada. Oh yeah, and three grooms, Maryanne, Paddi and India, a vet who was visiting from England. Maryanne took me to the pyramids before but this was my first time to take friends.
No matter what anyone says, the pyramids at Giza are BIG! Almost too big for us to see them all. I also wanted my friends to see the Solar Boat. Maryanne said that is a boat for the pharoah to sail with the Sun. Most boats sail in the water. I wanted to see this. We all stood in line for our tickets. Because we were so small, they didn't cost anything. Then we went inside to see the boat. It looked a lot like a sort of Viking boat with a high front and back, but really big and it was sort of floating in the air. The stairs in the museum went all around it. Al, Minnie and I all thought it was pretty cool and probably a good thing that it wasn't meant to go in the water because it looked like there were some holes in it. Maryanne said that after such a long time, the wood would shrink and it wasn't made with holes in it.

After we saw the boat, we went out to a place in the desert where people can take pictures of all the pyramids at Giza together. Mostly people go out there to be silly in pictures of the pyramids. India and Paddi had to stand on the wall with Minnie and Al while Maryanne and I took their picture in front of the pyramids. Lots of people were pretending to touch the tops of pyramids or hold them in their fingers. It looks very odd when they are doing it but I guess it works in the picture.

Al and I decided to ask the Tourist Police if people got arrested for picking up pyramids in pictures, but Maryanne said that we were being very silly ourselves. After taking some of their own silly pictures, Paddi, India and the boys went for a ride on a camel. Al, Minnie and I wanted to go too, but Maryanne said that we were too small and she would take us down to where we would meet the others near the bottom of the hill.

There was a restaurant down there, a Pizza Hut, where Paddi had promised the boys to buy them lunch. The pizza looked okay to me, and Maryanne, Paddi and India liked it just fine, but the boys had never eaten in Pizza Hut and they thought it was sort of strange. After lunch, India and Paddi wanted to look at some really old pictures of the pyramids in the bookstore next door, but we were getting tired and this old lion goddess offered to let us sit in her lap. That was very nice of her. Maryanne said that it was very, very nice of her because she had been the goddess of war in the old days.

The pyramids are a pretty cool place to visit but the next time I go I want to ride a camel too. And it's amazing how silly people act when they are hanging around a huge pile of rocks.

Sailing With The Sun

The other day Maryanne had some visitors and she decided that we should all go see the Solar Boat. I liked the idea of going on a boat again. For a moose, I have a lot of boat experience. I've been on the Nile cruise boat, the boat to Philae Island, and the boat with the window in the bottom in Sharm el Sheikh. That's quite a lot of boats, so a solar boat sounded pretty good, whatever kind of boat that might be.

Well, I was pretty surprised when we drove up to the Giza pyramids, got out of the car and walked over to a sort of banana-shaped building next to the biggest pyramid. What kind of boat are we going to see up on this rock covered hill, anyway? The closest water is in the bottles that the men are selling to thirsty tourists. We bought some tickets...Maryanne says that there are special prices for a moose...and went into a little room where some men gave us each some funny cloth slippers to put over our feet. This is weird. No one ever gave us slippers on any of the other boats.

There was a little problem for me with the slippers. They don't get so many very small visitors like Da Moose. They could find one slipper that was almost the right size but the other one was a bit bigger. Maryanne said not to worry because there were a lot of stairs to climb and she'd be carrying me. This boat was sounding stranger and stranger all the time. All the people coming in were putting on their slippers and then laughing at how their feet looked so funny..kind of like duck feet. Then we walked into another room that had a lot of pictures of people working around big holes in the rocks and there was a small boat in a glass case. It was a pretty nice looking boat with pointy ends and little oars. Maybe I would fit on it, but the big people were definitely going to be out of luck. There was also a big hole that people were looking into. It had been cut out of the stone and Maryanne said that hole was were they found the boat. I didn't know about that. The hole was too big for the little boat in the case, but how would you fit a real boat into the hole? And where was the water?

Then we walked into the next room and there was the boat! It looked just like the little one but it was really big. Maryanne said that the boat was about five thousand years old and that the people had taken it apart and put all the pieces in the hole in the ground. When other people found it later, they put it back together, sort of like a puzzle, and then they built the banana house around it so that it would stay nice and so that people (and moose too) could climb the stairs, walk all around and see it.

There was a little house in the middle of the boat but no swimming pool like on the Nile cruise boat and no window like on the fish boat in Sharm. Maryanne told me that the boat was made for the pharoah to sail down the Nile to his pyramid, so they didn't need much room on the boat. She said the the really big pieces of wood that they made the boat from came from a place called Lebanon that was famous for its cedar trees even now, but that there must have been much bigger trees back then. The other really interesting thing about the boat was that it was made completely from wood and rope. There were no nails holding it together at all. It must have taken a long, long time to tie all the knots. But the next time we get to see a boat, I want to go for a ride.

Visiting Giza Pyramids

One of the problems of being a young moose is the fact that you can't just go anywhere you want on your own. But Maryanne is pretty nice about taking me places. The other day we went to see the big pyramids here in Giza...really, really big pyramids. These things are the biggest piles of rocks I've ever seen. They are pretty interesting too. So many people come here to see them.

There are signs everywhere to say not to climb on the pyramids, but lots of the visitors climb on them a little bit. The rocks are so huge that kids need a grown up to help them get up and down on them. But to find these big rocks is so cool, who can resist climbing on them? Even grown ups climb up on them and some of them act pretty silly up there too. You can go inside the pyramids, at least some of them, but the tunnels inside are small and crowded. They aren't too bad for kids and a small moose, but most of the grown ups come out groaning about backs and legs and stuffy air.

Almost everywhere you look at the pyramids there are people selling interesting things like little statues of people with animal heads on them. Maryanne said that they were statues of the old Egyptian gods and goddesses. I don't know much about that but they were kind of fun to look at and the guys selling them really seemed to want me to have one or two of them. I didn't think that it was very nice that Maryanne didn't want to buy them for me. I could have come home with a car full of people with animal heads, post cards, and other stuff. Not fair if you ask me.
Other guys had lots of pretty pyramids in different colours and then there were the guys who offered camel and horse rides. There is so much going on at the pyramids that it's almost like a carnival. That's what Maryanne kept saying too. "This place is such a circus!"

The pyramids are really, really, really old. I think that they are about 7 or 8 thousand years old. I can't figure out how old that really is but they are older than most of the things that we saw when we went on our Nile cruise. Apparently, it was like the grandfather or great grandfather of the pharoah who made the biggest pyramid who invented pyramids in the first place and built one in Dahshur called the Red Pyramid. So these aren't the first pyramids but they are the biggest.

Visiting pyramids is fun. There are so many people running around, kids coming up to you saying "Hello. What is your name?" even though they don't seem to know what to answer if you ask what their name is. There are horses with people riding them, horses pulling carriages, camels with people riding, camels alone...maybe Maryanne is right and it really is some kind of circus.