Teaching English is Still Hard

...which is part of the reason that I haven't posted recently. I have been pretty worn out. Teaching English is hard, and it doesn't help that I've had to be out of the house many mornings at 8:20 am. I know some people may be having a hard time dredging up much sympathy for me since they have to get out of the house even earlier, but I am not really a morning person, never have been, and this is pretty difficult for me. I have also been staying up late at night working on lessons plans, so I have indeed been burning the candle at both ends, as they say, although in the case the candle is really a magic marker. I have made more drawings in the past week and a half than I have in the previous year. Visuals are pretty essential to language teaching, and I use them constantly -- drawing faces on the board to describe emotions, sketching out familiar (or unfamiliar, and sometimes downright odd) situations on the board.

I have finally managed to scrape out some time at a high-speed Internet cafe, so at long last it's time for

Documentary proof that I have visited the pyramids

The day before we left for the pyramids, our teacher (who is Egyptian) told us that the pyramids really are not that big of a deal and that it's not that much different than looking at a postcard.



I respectfully disagree.



One thing that the postcards just don't capture is that the pyramids are big. Hugely, awesomely big. In fact, until modern times the pyramids were the tallest buildings anywhere, according to our guide (who may, in fact, be wrong).

Most photos of the pyramids look something like this:
There's me, way in front of a pyramid. It's generally the only way you can get the whole pyramid in the picture.

However, I went ahead and stitched together a few pyramid photos so you can see just how high up the pyramid goes:

(Click on the picture for full effect)

That seems a lot larger, doesn't it? Especially when you know how large each of those blocks is. Here's a picture of me on the pyramids, which gives you some idea of just how massive each block is:
So, summary: Me, very tiny; pyramids, huge and awesome.


Of course, I had to get a nice panorama of the three biggest pyramids:
Over to the right of the photo is a valley filled with garbage, left by the tourists I imagine.

So, proof. And if that's not enough proof, I took a photo of the Spinx's butt:
That's not something you can get on a postcard!


Well, gotta go! My laptop is completely out of juice.