Blog Like an Egyptian

Again, my apologies for long delays between updates. I had a cold all weekend; before that, I was busy pretty much every night last week. But the schedule’s clearing up a little bit in the near future, and I’m feeling good. So hopefully this is the last long wait between posts.

In the Ancient Egypt class I took this spring, I learned just a little bit about Alexandria. I knew that Alexander the Great established it the first time around. I knew there was a pretty famous library there, but it had burned down. And that’s about all I knew. With regards to today’s Alexandria, I knew even less.

It turned out to be one of my favorite stops on the trip.

(Again, another apology is due here. The photos here are huge, I know. But in case you wanted to click them for a bigger shot, I uploaded the photos without resizing. If that’s causing headaches or too-slow load times, let me know, and I will upload smaller photos.)

Arrival

After arriving in Cairo and spending 3-4 days there, we took a van north to Alexandria. We were told the trip would take 2-3 hours, when it wound up taking 5 (including a stop at a Coptic Christian montastary, which I will cover in a later post).

No worries, though. We arrived and, before seeing the hotel, grabbed lunch at Mohamed Ahmed Restaurant. Our tour guide told us that he and his friend would drive 2-3 hours to Alexandria just for the falafel. I’m no falafel connoisseur, but I scooped up nearly every piece of available falafel in eyesight. It was a bit of a mish-mash of different foods for lunch, including foul (beans), French fries, falafel, pita bread and scrambled eggs.

(I suppose the American equivalent would be going to T.G.I.Friday’s with friends, ordering one of everything on the appetizer menu and sharing with everyone at the table. But the food at Mohamed Ahmed was way better.)

Bibliotheca Alexandria

Then we went to the Bibliotheca Alexandria. Now, back in its earliest days, Alexandria had the largest library in the world. Every ship captain who came to Alexandria had to turn over his manuscripts so scribes could copy them for the library. Unfortunately, the library burned to the ground, and everything inside was lost forever.

Today, the Bibliotecha Alexandria stands in its place and has room for up to 8 million books. Some of us started out on a tour of the library but, taken aback by the interior architecture, we wandered on our own for awhile. A lot of the architecutre is pretty amazing, too; the holes along the walls are meant to mimic the holes into which the rolled-up manuscripts were placed in the ancient Library of Alexandria.

The hotel

My room wasn’t the best.  But other rooms offered picture-perfect views of the Mediterranean Sea, with balconies and wide doors that allowed the wind to cool off even the warmest room. Our final morning in Alexandria, three of us chilled on the balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, talked about the trip and took in the view that would have cost hundreds of dollars in an equivalent American hotel. Here are photos looking to the left and the to the right from one of the nicer rooms:

and

Back to the first night. I sweated through the night while cars honked non-stop until 5 a.m. – one of our tour guides told us that Alexandria’s “busy time” each day lasted from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., thus ensuring that we woke up every hour or two to honking car horns or the train passing by (there were train tracks less than 500 feet from our room).

And there were shared bathrooms/showers, forcing everyone on the floor to fight over two bathrooms. It was a little weird to sit on the toilet and look straight at the shower, three feet in front of me. But whatever.

But that’s the only bad thing you’ll catch me saying about Alexandria.

Because honestly, the balcony outside my room allowed me to read and take in the sounds of Alexandria. And if I got bored with that, I could always stand up and take in a partially-obscured view of the Mediterranean Sea. So, all things considered, it could have been worse.

(That night, we ate at that seafood restaurant referenced in an earlier post. It was easily the best seafood I’ve had in my life. Good times.)

History

The next day, we took a tour around the city while our guide told us about its history. Basically, the city has been destroyed and built up again three times throughout its history. Ancient Alexandria lies buried under the modern city and in its harbor.

We took a tour of the Catacombs of Kom Al-Shuqafa and the Roman Amphitheater, which was discovered while breaking ground on a government building. It was cool to see these extremely old monuments amidst a much more modern city today.

(It’s especially insane to think about how old Alexandria is, considering that Vancouver just celebrated its 150th anniversary)

The Corniche

Then we took a drive along the Corniche – the road running parallel to the Mediterranean Sea. It was an especially lively section of town, with shops, public beaches and a nice barrier that people sat and relaxed on. After the sun went down, it was almost impossible to find somewhere to sit on this barrier. Whole families relaxed on the barrier together, having a good ol’ time. You definitely don’t see public gatherings like that in Vancouver.

If we had more time, I would have taken a walk along the Corniche; after all, it was easily the coolest area of Alexandria – both in terms of stuff to do and temperature. Along the Mediterranean Sea, a nice breeze keeps things relatively cool and pleasant. But once you’re a few blocks inward, the buildings stop a lot of the wind, and it gets extremely humid. We’re not used to the humidity in the Pacific Northwest, so it was a bit startling.

At the end of the Corniche is the one of the Egyptian Presidential Palaces. On this day, the Egyptian president was actually in Alexandria, so security was tight. We took a back route in, checked it out a bit and found a private beach for swimming (which I mentioned earlier).

Tangent

Here’s where I need to mention how friendly people were to us. After swimming, we went back to the hotel and split up into groups to find food. My group asked a local for a recommendation, and he actually walked us there. Turns out it was the place with good falafel from the day before, but we didn’t mind. But the walk was not just one or two blocks; it was a solid 5-10-minute walk. This wasn’t atypical at all, either. People did this kind of thing for us all the time.

Later that night, I waited for some friends outside the Internet cafe, and a man came up to me, offering all kinds of food recommendations – completely unsolicited. I think that’s awesome. Everywhere we went, I can think of a time when people went out of their way to help us find where we were going or help us with something.

/Tangent

That third day, we chilled a bit and hopped on the van around noon for the trip to Cairo. That night, we would board the overnight train to Aswan.