Egypt, not Virginia!

I spent the weekend soaking up sun and fun on the Mediterranean in Alexandria - not, as Jeff and Catharine first thought, in Alexandria, Virginia.

Our departure from Cairo was scheduled for 7 PM on Thursday evening; for those of you not familiar with the way time works in Egypt, that means the buses showed up at 7:45 PM and we didn't leave town for another half hour. And the two-and-a-half hour ride we were promised? Try a trip lasting nearly five hours, including almost half an hour to get gas (apparently they were filling up with an eyedropper) and a ninety minute break at Lion Village, a rest stop straight out of the Twilight Zone.

Located on the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road, Lion Village is part petting zoo, part souvenir shop, part restaurant, and 100% weird. The complex is centered around a series of animal pens and cages, containing everything from chickens to camels, most of which, frankly, looked like they didn’t have much time left. There were at least two dozen ostriches spread out over a few fenced in yards; this article from the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt gives some clue as to what they were doing with so many ostriches. The décor didn’t exactly reassure the animal lovers among us, either; the beams supporting the roof were covered in furs and stuffed crocodiles and fish hung from the ceiling, along with massive bunches of garlic cloves (presumably to cover up the smell for guests in the adjacent restaurant). We lost our appetites pretty quickly, and resigned to waiting for the other bus to catch up and keeping watch for stray critters. (Photo courtesy of Ellen Green.)

We finally rolled into Alexandria (or Alex, since we can’t be bothered with those last three syllables) around 1:30 AM, and wisely elected to save exploring the city for the following morning. Driving in on the Corniche, Alex’s 20 km seafront road, was pretty amazing at night; like the rest of the Egyptian population, Alexandrians do not sleep, and the sidewalks and public beaches were still crammed with couples, families and friends even after midnight. Our hotel didn’t disappoint; my room had a gorgeous sea view and a nice breeze off the water, and there was a (very) small private beach across the Corniche for hotel guests.

Friday morning, I had breakfast and took a short walk down the beach with my roommate, Amanda. Alex’s seafront road, which is called the Corniche, runs about 20 km along the Mediterranean coast, and the city only extends about 5 km inland at its widest point. Our first stop of the morning was Kom es-Shoqafa (“Mound of Shards” in Arabic), the remains of a Roman-era catacomb complex. I had been expecting something more akin to my previous catacomb experience (dark, smelly, lots of bones); however, the Kom es-Shoqafa catacombs are entirely devoid of human remains. We spent a lot of time exploring the labyrinthine corridors of burial niches, carved entirely by hand and extending more than 30m underground. We also visited Pompey’s Pillar (which is actually a monument to the Roman emperor Diocletian), and the Roman amphitheater, although the heat sucked some of the fun out of those excursions.

We returned to the hotel early in the afternoon and went to lunch before hitting up the beach for a couple of hours before dinner. Having read that Alexandria is even more conservative than Cairo, I didn’t even bother bringing a bathing suit on the trip, instead choosing to lay out in shorts and my t-shirt. Unfortunately, due to the commercialization of Alex’s seafront, the beaches aren’t nearly as pristine as they look in photos; the sand was littered with pop tabs (Egypt still has the kind that you pull off and discard) and cigarette butts, and there were some plastic snack wrappers and a discarded cigarette box floating near the shore. Still, after a long hot day, it was nice to wade into the water and nap in a beach chair for a few hours in the late afternoon.

After a dinner of kufta and rice, we all piled back on the bus to go to the Green Plaza, an outdoor shopping-dining-entertainment complex on the edge of the city. I spent some time with friends at a café drinking mango juice and chatting, and Amanda’s impromptu dance routine to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” attracted the attention of a group of Egyptian girls having a private party at the restaurant, who immediately ran over and dragged her into their party. Later, we went and bought sweets and snacks for the trip home.

On Saturday we left early after breakfast for Fort Qaitbay, which stands on the site of the former Pharos Lighthouse (of Seven Ancient Wonders fame). After the lighthouse was destroyed in an earthquake in the 1300s AD, the site lay vacant for nearly a century, until Sultan Qa’it Bey began construction on the fort in 1477. The upper floors of the central keep offer amazing views of the sea and the surrounding city, as well as cool sea breezes.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina was our next stop, and my favorite of the weekend. (Take from that what you will.) The library is only 5 years old, constructed on the site of the original Library of Alexandria, which was burned accidentally by Julius Caesar in 48 BC (not, as is often rumored, by conquerors from Arabia), and contains nearly 500,000 volumes – with room for over 7.5 million more. My first impression was that it was a fairly ugly structure, a granite-and-glass half cylinder rising out of the ground, but having seen the inside, I would perhaps more judiciously describe it as interesting. Like the original library, its façade is made of Aswan granite, and is carved with letters from hundreds of ancient and modern languages. On the seaward side is the Planetarium, and a beautiful reflecting pool stretching all the way to the Corniche.

After a stop at the Fish Market restaurant for lunch, we piled back on the bus to return to Cairo. I won’t go into detail about the ride home; suffice to say it was long and stuffy and slightly miserable in the back of the bus, and when I got back I was immediately hit in the face by Cairo’s delightful air. Overall, though, the trip was fantastic, and I definitely intend to return for a weekend to see some of the sites I missed, like the museums, churches and the (former) Hotel Cecil, where British Intelligence planned El-Alamien.