Alexandria

After we got home Thanksgiving night and put Luke to bed, I set about packing for our trip to Alexandria with the Simons. I was so tired that I packed about halfway and then crashed. Friday morning I got up to finish the job. We got in a cab around seven and headed to the train station. We boarded the train around 7:45 and left the station around 8:00. The tickets there and back cost us about $20 each, I think. Assigned seats, non-smoking cars. Luke sat on our laps and looked at books (here we’re looking at the Sphinx) and watched Barney. This is Rachella in her neck brace pillow. We made fun of her but I actually think it looks sort of comfortable. The trip was 2 hours. We’d all heard how nice Alexandria was, but when we exited the station we were less than impressed with what we saw. It was trashy like parts of Cairo, and we couldn’t figure out exactly where we were. We crossed a big square to try to find a street sign, and there on the ground was the decaying neck and head of a goose, as if a butcher had just chopped it off and thrown it on the ground. I was thoroughly grossed out.

We spoke to a few local guys and figured out we’d gotten out at the wrong station. Luckily, we were in Alexandria, but we had gotten off one stop too early. In hindsight, I think the train attendant was trying to tell us that, but none of us understood what he meant. :\ We hopped in a cab to get to our hotel.

Our hotel, The Union Hotel, was rated one of the best budget hotels in our Lonely Planet book. It was situated near the water (Alex is on the Mediterranean), and we’d called ahead to book our rooms so that we’d be sure to get a sea view. The hotel is up on the 5^th and 6^th floors of an office-type building. The ground floor was not impressive at all. Actually it was really sketchy looking, but we knew to expect that because we’d read reviews online. Once we got up to the actual hotel we were totally satisfied with the looks of the place. It was a clean, bug-free 2-star hotel. We had a really nice view of the sea, our own bathroom, and two twin beds. (Yes—for those of you who haven’t traveled overseas the cheap way, there are hotels with shared bathrooms, and you do pay extra for having your own.) Our room rate included breakfast. We paid $20.

Oh, and just outside our hotel was a gym. Here is the sign advertising it.

“Top GUM” Funny on a few levels. Did they mean Top Gun? Or Top Gym?

The hotel didn’t have our rooms ready until noon, so we left our bags with the front desk and went off to find the tourist information center and some food. We were really adventurous. We ate McDonald’s.

After filling our tummies we returned to the hotel, got our room, and regrouped before going on a whiz-bang tour of Alexandria.

Our first matter of business was to buy our return train tickets to Cairo. We walked the mile or so from the hotel to the train station where we should have gotten off. It was really nice around the tourist train station! There were plazas and parks, and it was cleaner than pretty much anywhere I’ve seen in Cairo so far. We went in and bought the tickets for the next day. Noel and Rachella decided to leave early the next morning, and Jason and I decided to catch the 2 PM train home.

The Roman amphitheatre, called Kom el-Dikka, is just across from the train station, so we stopped by there for a look-see. We did not go in, but peered through the fence and snapped a few pictures. Here’s what our Rough Guide to Egypt says about Kom el-Dikka: “Since 1959 Polish archaeologists and staff from the Greco-Roman Museum have removed the Turkish fort and slums on Kom el-Dikka (Mound of Rubble), revealing a substratum of Roman remains beneath a Muslim cemetery….The elegant Roman Theatre has marble seating for seven to eight hundred…” So under a bunch of trash, a cemetery, and a fort lay the remains of this place. Some of it looks like it was created last year.

After the amphitheatre we caught a cab to go to the catacombs. That cab ride was the longest, yuckiest cab ride I’ve been on yet. The driver kept rolling down the window to holler at other drivers, which terrified Luke. (“He’s not going to talk anymore!” Luke kept saying.) It was hot, we were squnched all in there, and there was a mega traffic jam. We never figured out why, but we could’ve walked to the catacombs faster than we got there in the taxi. Oh well, it gave us a chance to see parts of Alexandria SLOWLY. As we drove through a souk area I watched one hawker hold up different items of clothing from his stall and advertise them to the crowd by yelling out the virtues of each piece, and then he auctioned it off. I tried too late to get Jason to video it. We saw a lot of interesting things for sale, as well as a cooking fire right in the middle of a street. It was next to these birds.

We were not supposed to take pictures in the catacombs. I rebelled. Usually I obey rules like that, and I actually do feel guilty about ignoring the rule…but I didn’t use flash (except on this first one) and I need the pictures to help me remember what I’m going to write. (Well. I wouldn’t accept those excuses from a student…what a bad example I am.) Still, here are the pictures. I thought the catacombs were pretty cool. Smaller than I remember the ones in Rome being. There are three levels of catacombs, and the lowest is flooded with water, so it’s not accessible, but we could get to the first two levels. The second one even had water down in the bottom of some of the tombs. Basically all there was to see were rectangular openings in the walls where bodies were laid, but then it was also interesting to see the different types of decoration in certain parts of the catacombs. Apparently this burial site blends Greek, Roman, and Egyptian cultural traditions. This part is called the Central Tomb, and the carvings are spectacular. You can see the Egyptian gods Sobek and Anubis wearing Roman armor. (Anubis is the jackal-headed one in the center.)

It didn’t take too long to see the catacombs, and after that we decided to walk past Pompey’s Pillar to take a picture. The pillar was erected to honor Diocletian (not sure why it’s called Pompey’s) and was originally part of a temple which served as a “daughter library” to the original library at Alexandria. Having heard the site is pretty disappointing, we paused to take this picture but did not go in.

We enjoyed the walk from the catacombs through the market streets. We thought this part of Alexandria was really neat and quite pretty.

We saw these goats eating trash. It’s unfortunate that the picture is so zoomed in, because they were basically grazing on a huge hill made all of trash. I’m talking a hill probably a story high.

There were also shops where you could purchase live chickens. Here is Luke looking at the chickens.

Next we went to the Fort Qaitbey. It looked so cool; I wanted to build it out of Legos. The fort sits on the site of the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the original Seven Wonders of the ancient world. This is what the lighthouse probably looked like: The base of the fort actually incorporates some of the red-granite pillars that were probably part of the Pharos. We were supposed to be able to get into the fort, but for whatever reason it was closed. It was really pretty outside the fort near the water. There were several vendors selling souvenirs along the walkway and lots of people enjoying the fresh air.

After the fort we went to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. It sits near the site of the original ancient library at Alexandria. This new library was opened in 2002. The outside of the building has letters and symbols from every known alphabet carved into it. A suspended spherical planetarium (looks like the Death Star) is just outside the library. I got to tour the library with Noel and Rachella. Jason sweetly let me go in while he stayed outside with Luke, who was not allowed to go in the actual library. (Kids 6-18 can go in the children’s library, and the main reading room is only open to adults.) The library itself was really neat. There are seven levels. The bookshelves are lit from within. It has the largest reading room in the world, with desks with neat reading lights attached. There are over 300 computers there for public use. The library also houses a COMPLETE copy of the internet—every page since (I think) 1994 is on its servers, and a plasma screen in the library displays a different page every few seconds. The most amazing thing is the Espresso Book Machine, though. It can produce a complete copy of any book that has been uploaded to its memory in ten minutes. If this machine were to become widespread it would totally revolutionize the publishing industry. As of now, there is only one other in the world, in Washington DC.

We also went in the children’s library, which was really cool. It was decorated with bright colors, had books in several languages, and had lots of activities for the kids. I found an Arabic copy of A Wrinkle in Time and a Braille copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

We had dinner that night at a restaurant called Mohammed Ahmed’s. We ate a delicious Egyptian meal with lots of pita bread, hummus, falafel (which tastes like hush puppies to me), and fuul (think refried beans). It was a feast, and it only cost $7. To feed five of us.

When we got back to the hotel we said goodbye to the Simons, who were leaving early the next morning. We went to bed by 8:30! It was an exhausting day. Here is the view from our hotel room. The fort is on the left side, and the library is somewhere over to the right.

The next morning we decided to skip breakfast at the hotel and go to a restaurant Noel had read about in his guidebook. After breakfast we went back to the tourist office and asked about somewhere we could go to walk along a beach. The lady told us about a park that also had beaches, so we took a cab there. The park was really nice, but we found out we couldn’t get onto the beaches without paying an access fee that was pretty high. So we enjoyed the park. I couldn’t resist climbing this tree, though when I got onto the lowest branch it felt way too scary, and I didn’t go any higher. Luke got up there with me, and then Jason showed off his climbing skills and went even higher in the tree. It was fun to share Luke’s first tree-climbing experience.

We boarded the train for our trip back to Cairo. Luke fell asleep on my lap shortly after departure and stayed asleep almost until we got to Cairo. Alexandria was a neat place—I wouldn’t mind living there (instead of Cairo)!