Teenager Illegally Climbs the Great Pyramid, Because Rules Don’t Count If You Really Want to Instagram Something
Rules, what are they good for, right? Only boring old sheeple do things like stand in line and pay taxes and respect milliennia-old wonders of the ancient world. Cool people, like 18-year-old German Andrej Ciesielski, say “whatever, I do what I want,” and illegally climb the pyramids so they can get some totally sweet photos for their blogs.
According to Yahoo Parenting, it is totally illegal to climb the Great Pyramid at Giza, which is 455 feet tall and began construction at around 2580 bce. Egypt doesn’t want people dying by falling off the pyramids, and they also don’t want a bunch of tourists screwing up monuments that have stood for thousands of years, so climbing the Great Pyramid is punishable by up to three years in prison.
Knowing all that, 18-year-old Ciesielski did it anyway. He put on his GoPro–because if you don’t record your experiences for the Internet, do they even really happen?–and scurried right to the top of the Great Pyramid. He made it part way up before the police saw him and started shouting at him in Arabic, but he says, “I didn’t care and kept going while listening to music.”
If that were my kid he would have to stay up on top of the Great Pyramid forever, because he would be in so much trouble when he came down. At the very least I would glare at him very intensely and probably say something like, “In this house we respect the wonders of the ancient world, young man!”
It took him 8 minutes to climb to the top and 20 minutes to climb back down, where the police were waiting for him. The climb could have cost him three years in prison in Egypt, but Ciesielski said he didn’t care.
”I thought the photos would be worth it,” he told the Telegraph.
Personally, I don’t think he really thought the photos would be worth three years in prison in Egypt. I think he figured that a guy like him wouldn’t actually face any consequences for climbing the Great Pyramid, and it turns out he was right about that.
Ciesielski got off very lucky, and instead of being jailed or even sent to the German consulate, the officers released him on the condition that they were going to delete all the photographic evidence of the climb. They sure know how to hit a kid where it hurts! With no photos for his blog, why even bother?
Making him delete the photos might have been an appropriate punishment for the kid, but unfortunately Ciesielski will actually face no consequences at all. Apparently unbeknownst to the officers, software exists that can restore deleted photos. After the officers released Ciesielski, he recovered all the deleted photos and put the footage from his climb on his blog.
”Some people were really angry but I don’t care,” said the teenager. ”I didn’t destroy anything. I didn’t hurt anyone.”
One person touching a painting wouldn’t hurt it, but we’re still not allowed to touch the art in the Louvre, because if everyone did it everything eventually would be ruined. I wonder how many teenagers would have to climb up the Great Pyramid for Instagram before chunks started falling off or getting damaged. This is why rules like “Don’t climb the fucking Great Pyramid” exist. It’s not because one kid climbing up it is going to make the whole thing fall over, it’s that if one jerk with a GoPro does it, there are probably 100 kids in GoPros right behind him.
(Via Wikimedia Commons/Nina)
