an idiot abroad egypt — 1 honest verdict on the pyramids

pyramids are big rocks stacked with intention. karl said something close to that and the producers winced. i did not wince. i agreed out loud, in my apartment, to nobody. egypt is, by my reckoning, a country where the rocks finally got a publicist.

it is 11:23am on a friday. second mug, monitor at the slightly-wrong angle nobody fixes. carla left a slack note saying she’s stuck in the vendor onboarding for the new procurement portal — by her tone, the worst meeting on the calendar this quarter. i have, by polite estimate, the rest of the morning.

so. an idiot abroad egypt. the search query, typed quietly, late, by a person on a couch. they want the pyramid scene, the camel scene, the bit where karl looks at a wonder of the world and offers a verdict the travel industry has spent forty years trying to suppress. i’m here, on a desk issued for spreadsheet purposes, defending that verdict. public service.

an idiot abroad egypt refers to the egypt segments in the karl pilkington travel series, originally aired on sky1 between 2010 and 2012. karl visits the pyramids, rides a camel, eats a meal he did not order, and produces, on camera, a verdict the global tourism industry would prefer you forgot. the rocks are, by his read, fine.

THE. PYRAMIDS. ARE. ROCKS.

that needs to be on the page before we go further. the karl pilkington travel show on imdb has held a rating of eight point three for over a decade, and a generous percentage of that is, in my private theory, propped up by the pyramid scene alone. karl, in front of a structure built by an entire civilization, expressed a level of polite disinterest i have been quietly trying to recreate at every social event i’ve been forced to attend.

what an idiot abroad egypt actually refers to

two things, properly distinguished. one: the egypt-set sequences in the karl pilkington travel series, clustered early because egypt is, by tourism logic, a starter wonder. two: a state of mind — the posture of a man dropped in front of a monument and filmed not enjoying it. that posture is the most useful one available to the modern traveler. it costs nothing. no visa required.

the searcher typing the query at 9pm is doing one of three things. looking for the clip. looking for permission to feel the same way about pyramids. or, in the saddest case, planning a trip and getting last-minute cold feet — a healthier instinct than the travel industry would like you to know. my standing argument for why the karl pilkington travel show is the only honest travel television ever broadcast is the longer answer to that instinct.

the pyramids, an honest opinion from a man who has not been

let me defend a position here, from a building i don’t pay rent for, on hours technically purchased by a payroll department in another time zone.

the deeper point karl never quite said but i’ll say for him: monuments are objects that survived because nobody had the heart to remove them. they are not magic. they are big rocks. people stacked them. some of those people were, by the historical record, having a worse week than i have ever had. the brochure cannot afford the labor history. karl accidentally restored it.

monuments i can see from my own window, an honest survey

i live in an apartment with a window that faces a parking lot, a small tree the building has given up on, and the corner of a building from 1974 that the city has declared structurally fine. that building is a monument. it has stood. that is the whole job description, and it is doing it perfectly, on a budget of zero, with no tour guides.

let me list the monuments visible from my apartment, briefly:

• the parking lot. a flat surface that has outlasted three managers and one tenant association.
• the small tree. alive, depending on the year. survived two attempts to remove it. the tree is winning.
• the building from 1974. still standing. still beige. a small pyramid with windows.
• the seventh microwave on my counter. a domestic monument. i have killed six of these. the seventh has, so far, survived me. that is monument behavior.

four monuments. domestic. unglamorous. visible without a flight. monuments are mostly things people did not bother to take down. that’s the genre.

when not to confuse a pyramid with a tomb

brief technical aside. a pyramid is a shape. a tomb is a function. the egyptian pyramids are both — pyramid-shaped tombs, built for kings who, by the textual evidence, very much did not want to be forgotten. most of what people call “the pyramids” refers to the giza complex: three pyramids, a sphinx, and a parking situation that is, by every account i’ve read in places i can’t link to, among the most aggressive in the country. karl walks past most of this with the resigned expression of a man at a very long airport.

pyramids globally include structures from civilizations that had no contact with each other — evidence, in my private theory, not of aliens but of physics. physics rewards stacking. the karl episode on the great wall of china covers a different stacking strategy — long instead of tall, horizontal labor instead of vertical. both are, in the larger karl reading, the same essay about humans needing to stack things to feel okay.

findings, ice cream is breakfast and so is silence

the broader case is that the show is a quiet documentary on the case for not going, and the egypt segment is the cleanest test of that thesis. karl in front of a wonder of the world, being paid, with the lighting decent and the camel patient, files an accurate, low-temperature, slightly bored verdict. the rocks are alright. everyone else was trying to sell you the trip, the airline, the boat down the nile that costs nine times what i pay in monthly rent.

the comparison piece, if you want it, is across the run. karl in brazil, declined politely, with carnival in the background is the loud version of the same argument. the question of why karl never came back after 2012 is the quiet version. egypt is the original — where the posture was first calibrated.

ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk. i’d defend that take in any country. cereal contains milk. yogurt contains milk. ice cream is, by the same rule, breakfast. silence, by similar logic, is also breakfast — both improve the day, both are routinely opposed by people who insist breakfast must be loud and warm. it can be cold. it can be quiet. karl, in egypt, in a hotel that did not adapt to him, surely had some version of this thought.

the stefan-type colleague three rows over — the one who has been to most of the wonders — has been to egypt. he tells me about it by the kettle on a friday afternoon when i’m trying to get out of the office without being seen. the heat. the food. the camels. the experience was, in his telling, life-changing. i nod. i pour. egypt is, for him, real and beautiful and worth the credit card debt. for me, egypt is a tv show i watched in 2011 with a microwave i later killed. the visa is just shorter.

i also have, in my closet, a tie i own and have never worn. the tie is, in the architectural sense, a small monument. structural. decorative. has outlived two relationships. it does not need to be in egypt to be impressive. neither do i.

the unopened mail pile, by the way, has tilted a degree further left since i started this paragraph. seven envelopes, three red. egypt does not write to me. that is, on balance, a relief.

the seventh microwave is the one i recommend if you’re deciding to stay home. they give me a tiny commission if you click through and buy one. funds the next microwave. honest arrangement, by my standards, which are low.

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