Hello everybody, welcome to my revolutionary new project: The World Internet Tour. I'll be your virtual online tour guide today as we explore some of the world's most fantastic monuments and buildings over the internet. Thanks for signing up and promptly depositing your payments via PayPal for this first ever web-based world tour where you get to see some of the world's most stunning sites with in-depth commentary provided by yours truly, all done with nothing more than an internet browser and Skype. So sit back, relax, and enjoy being a part of internet history... also just bear in mind I have a pretty slow internet connection, so you'll have to be a little patient.
First stop: the Taj Mahal in Pakistan or India! Not sure which country it's in, but I'm pretty sure it's in one of those two countries, or possibly Bangladesh. Let me just Google that... like I said, the internet's pretty slow right now... sometimes it's a little faster, especially at night... thank you for your patience... I'm supposed to be getting 8 mbps with the package I'm on, but I don't know... I should call TTNET and get it looked into... still waiting... aha, India it is! The Taj Mahal is in India. It is a white building, very white in fact, by the looks of it, probably made of marble, with four towers around it signifying East, West, North and South, or perhaps Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter... or maybe Diamonds, Clubs, Spades and Hearts? I guess the towers can be used as a metaphor for any group of four things. It's safe to say whoever built this probably considered four to be his lucky number. Let's see what Wikipedia says about why it was built... waiting for the page to load now... sorry about this, I know it's annoying... really terrible connection I have here... Okay, it was built as a tomb by Shah Jahan the Mughal Emperor to honor his... damn, I accidentally clicked a link on the side of the page while I was trying to scroll down and now it's loading another page... ugh, that's going to take forever... You know what? Let's leave the Taj Mahal for now and move on to the next magnificent venue...
Welcome to China, for the magnificent Great Wall of China, the longest wall in the world! Apparently it was built by... waiting for those search results... I googled "Great Wall" although maybe I should've googled "Great Wall of China"... I might be waiting in vain... I don't want to get a whole bunch of random search results for other really big walls, I just want the Chinese one... seriously, why is the internet so slow... oh there it is, finally... Okay it says here it was built by the Emperor Qin Shih Huang to keep out "various warlike peoples or forces". Hm... that seems a little childish, just building a big wall like that. I mean, can't the enemy just attack around it? Or climb it when nobody's looking? Plus if they're "warlike" it seems they'd also be pretty persistent. You probably wouldn't really get warlike people going "Oh shit, a wall? Bummer. Okay, let's go back I guess". They'd be like AAAAAAAAAAA DIE MOTHERFUCKERS WE'RE COMING ANYWAY YOU CAN'T STOP US CHAAAAARGE WAR WAR WAR! and they'd build some ladders or hot air balloons out of sheep stomachs or something
Moving right along, we're now in the exotic orient at the Haghia Sophia in Istanbul. Okay, this time the page loaded pretty quickly, I don't know why the internet is sometimes slow and sometimes fast, but right now it's pretty good so let me take this chance to also open the Wikipedia link for our next site which is the Pyramids... great, ok, so while I talk about the Haghia Sophia, the Pyramids will be ready and we can spare some time as we jump straight to that without waiting for the page to open... So, says here the Haghia Sophia was a church, then a mosque, then a museum? I think I speak for our whole online tour group when I say MAKE UP YOUR MINDS!
I'm pretty impatient to get to my favorite place ever: the Pyramids in Egypt! You can see in the above picture the Pyramid of the Sun there from the top of the Pyramid of the Moon, at least that's what the caption says on Wikipedia... I remember there being a third pyramid too in Egypt, but I guess that's not in this photo. That's funny, I always thought the Pyramids were in Giza, but it says here they're in a place called "Teotihuacan". Says here it means "Where the Gods were born" in...what language is that... Nahuatl? Hm, so that's the language the ancient Egyptians spoke. Who knew that? I guess we all just discovered something new today, thanks to my little guided tour. See, I told you it would be worth it. Wow, another amazing fact is that the pyramids are only an hour's drive from Mexico City! I never knew Mexico City was so geographically close to Cairo. I read somewhere that the Egyptians believed the pyramids were intergalactic soul transporters for the Pharaohs, who would get their brains extracted from their noses with a stick before being mummified and beamed up to the stars. I will assume the Egyptians also invented LSD.
Off to Central America now to scale the mountains in search of the amazing Machu Picchu in Peru! I found a really good photo on Google Images but it's taking forever to load. Seriously, I pay like 80 TL a month for this shit. That's a lot of money to pay for sitting here waiting for things to open and download and upload all day because I'm not getting the internet connection I'm paying for. My parents pay 40 TL or something with their Superonline package, and their internet connection is way better than this... I should read our contract. Ugh, where the hell is our internet contract anyway? Okay, there it is, finally, Machu Picchu. Beautiful, just look at that jpeg. Wikipedia says Machu Picchu was a lost city that was swallowed by jungle after being abandoned hundreds of years ago until it was discovered by chance by an explorer named Hiram Bingham in 1911. Tragic. Moral of the story? Don't build your city on top of a mountain!
Next up is the Colosseum in Rome and it's taking FOREVER for that page to open as well. I swear it's probably a browser thing, I should get off Explorer and switch to Chrome or Firefox. The good thing about Explorer is you can surf previously opened pages offline, that can be handy but... ugh, COME ON! Ok, you know what, I'm just going to wing it on the Colosseum, so here goes: dates back to something early A.D., Gladiators, Emperor Nero playing a fiddle, etc. I guess that covers it... spectators go thumbs up, the gladiator lives, thumbs down the gladiator dies... or vice versa. Oh great, now Skype crashed.
Hi everyone, back online now, sorry about that half hour delay. I turned the modem on and off and that seems to have helped. Also I had no idea my girlfriend was streaming videos of cute animals on youtube. I guess that's why the... hello? Anyone there? Why do I suddenly have a bunch of angry emails in my inbox? Let me just read those... Hm... ok, look, I mentioned to you that I do NOT give any refunds, you pay and you get the tour. Also I don't appreciate you calling me "idiot", "scam artist", "moron", or "waste of time". Some smart ass here says I "could've done a little research on the sites I show". Well that wouldn't be a problem if Wikipedia would open quicker, would it? It's already on Wikipedia, so why should I waste my time memorizing all that stuff as well? Is it my fault if the internet is slow? Another person here says I am "so retarded I don't even know the difference between the pyramids in Mexico and the pyramids in Egypt". Okay, you got me on that one. I did not know there were pyramids in Mexico. But that's the beauty of this interactive world tour: the virtual tour guide also learns new things right along with the virtual tourist! After all, knowledge is not static, it's dynamic and always changing and evolving, and my revolutionary new approach has just demonstrated that fact. We have interactively created new knowledge, instead of just recycling knowledge that already exists. Right? Tell me that doesn't sound mind-blowingly revolutionary? Honestly, one day The World Internet Tour is going to be BIG, it's going to be the next MySpace or Friendster, so you should all be excited that you can say you were the first ever The World Internet Tourists. You can proudly call yourselves TWITs for short. Alright alright, I should've thought of a better acronym for this, I didn't see that coming until I actually wrote it out. I'll work on that name.
Anyway, I just checked speedtest.net, and yes, my internet connection IS slow. It's at 1.2 mbps. That proves that it's not my fault this revolutionary new concept was less than perfect on its maiden world tour. But like all visionaries, I will not quit. We will continue to add new Wikipedia destinations on a daily basis. One day EVERYBODY will travel the world without leaving their couch.
Tell your friends!
