Around the World: How Tall is Tall?

You might be wondering how all of these tall buildings and monuments I've been seeing stack up against each other. Sometimes, things look really big because there isn't anything else around it, or because everything else around it is very short. Sometimes, buildings can look shorter than they are because they're surrounded by really tall things. Here, I'll line them up to show you how tall they really are.

First, let's do a quick review of the standard units of measurement. I like to use a saying to help me remember the metric units:

"King Henry's Daughter Makes Delicious Chocolate Milk"

The first letter of each word stands for a unit of measurement:

Kilometers Hectometers Decameters Meters Decimeters Centimeters Millimeters

Or, in their short forms: km hm Dm  m dm  cm  mm

If you can remember this saying, then you'll remember the order of the units of measurement and easily be able to tell how many of one unit is equal to one of something else. For example, there are 10 mm in 1 cm; there are 10 cm in 1 dm. There are 10 dm in 1 m, and so on.

I will use meters to show how tall these buildings are. If you can picture a meter stick, then you'll have an reference to go by. For me, 1 m is equal to the distance between my feet and my hips.

So, let's take a look at the height of these World Famous Buildings standing side-by-side.

     

Eiffel Tower, France: 324 m                St George's church, Ethiopia: 12 m

          

  Faro, Uruguay: 34 m                        Shiva statue, Mauritius: 33 m 

           

Qutb Minar, India: 73 m                 Calgary Tower, Canada: 191 m

     

CN Tower, Canada: 553 m                        Taj Mahal, India: 73 m

To see the difference in height between these structures, it would be even easier if we graphed them. I'll start by putting the heights up the y axis (the vertical line), and the names of the structures along the x axis (the horizontal line). Then, I'll use bars to show their heights. Now, I can really see how tall the CN Tower is compared with the other structures!

Organizing information in a graph is a great way to make more sense of it!

The End of Leg One

Leaving Tanzania for me means the end of the first leg, or section, of our trip. Although some people consider the island of Madagascar to be apart of the continent of Africa, it's an island that's been separated from the mainland for 140 million years! That means the people have developed quite differently. We saw differences between people in other East Africa countries, but mainly they were similar. We know in Madagascar we will see SO many animals and plants that are found no where else in the world, and the people have their own unique language called Malagasy.

It also feels, in a way, like the real trip is just beginning. September has started, so I feel like I should be back at school, and we've been traveling for two months now so any little comforts from home, like granola bars, have long since disappeared. We know the trip is about to get a lot harder because Madagascar is not very well visited by tourists. So in commemoration of the first leg of our journey, and because we finally got our video editing software to work, here is a glimpse of my trip so far set to one of my favourite songs. It is appropriately called, Our Ancestors, by Christopher Tinn, and the video starts with my experiences in Ethiopia, the beginning of civilization.

Ethiopia

You might remember our school musical from two years ago, Dig It. At the beginning, a skeleton name Lucy showed the two kids the history of human kind starting in Ethiopia. That's because our earliest human ancestors were from there, and it's where the oldest human skeleton fossils have been found. It seemed like the best place to start my journey, so on Day 1 of my trip, I visited the real "Lucy" at the National Museum in Addis Ababa, the captial of Ethiopia.

Her skeleton was found incomplete (left), so they used scientific analysis and digital reconstruction to recreate what they think the rest of her skeleton looked like (right).

The people in Ethiopia are very religious (with half being Christian and half being Muslim). They get along very well and each respect the other's holy days and traditions. Because Ethiopia is such an old country, it has some of the world's oldest churches. On Day 3 of my trip, I visited some gorgeous churches carved out of stone in a town called Lalibela. These churches are over 900 YEARS old! Notice how they carved the rock away, and how amazing the detail is.

In Lalibela, I was also very lucky to get to see their weekly Saturday market. It was a lot like our farmer's markets but much bigger, and you could buy everything from food to house supplies to live animals! People from the surrounding villages and farmers from the countryside walk a very long way to come to the market. They sell whatever goods they have, or trade for what they need.

At night time, people have the doors of their houses open and they like to visit with friends and family. I could see into their houses and most people had a couple of plastic chairs (like patio furniture), and a table. Many sleep on thin mattresses on the floor. Here is a picture of a typical house in Ethiopia:

Ethiopia used to have a royal family. On Day 6, I visited the city named Gondar to see some of the castle ruins from the days of Kings and Emperors. People call Gondar "Camelot" because the castles look like the mythical land of King Arthur.

These baths (left) were built originally to treat one of the king's skin condition. After his time, and nowadays, they are used during religious festivals. The pool is filled up to the pathway that you see, and rickety wooden stadium seating is set around the wall. As you can see, the trees have started growing into the wall.

Gondar is surrounded by mountains that are lush and green because it is currently the rainy season. I went for a hike to find gelada baboons, a type that can only be found here in Ethiopia. We found them on a cliff side. Farm children sit all day long yelling at the baboons to keep them away from their fields because they will eat the crops.

I also saw colobus monkeys, which look so cool when they jump! We have a couple at the Calgary Zoo that you might remember seeing on our field trip.







Lasting Impressions:

* Ethiopians are very friendly and welcoming to tourists. I always felt safe.
* I had an image of Africa that was very dry and barren. Now I know that it can be very beautiful and lush in the rainy season. Ethiopia has a lot of rivers and big lakes.
* There are many ENDEMIC species in Ethiopia. This means there are lots of animals that are only found here in the wild (like the gelada baboons).
* Even in the rainy season some places (like Gondar) experience water shortages and power outages frequently. One day I had to bathe with a bucket of cold water!
* Children seem to love school and like practising their English. They knew that Canada's capital city was Ottawa and that Toronto and Vancouver are our most major cities. They would get huge smiles when they saw tourists and yell "hello" and come shake our hands to welcome us.

Games I Saw Children Playing:
* pool, foosbal, and ping-pong
* marbles
* hoop and stick
* sledding down dirt piles on whatever they could find (I saw a few kids on old toilet lids!)

This picture is from a traditional restaurant where I got to watch people show the different dances of Ethiopia's 13 regions. One of the dancers came over and pulled me up to try dancing...it was really hard to do the "shoulder shake" dance!

At a lake in Debre Zeyit.