Hello!
Sorry we haven’t blogged in awhile. It’s about that time of the semester when we’ve just survived mid-terms and are beginning our research papers for each class. Anyway, we managed to make it up to Alexandria two weeks ago and spend the weekend there. Alexandria’s by far the closest destination to Cairo. Although it’s 135 miles away, it was a fast trip for two reasons: first, we were able to catch a train and be there in two hours, and second it was the first place we’ve been to outside of Cairo where we didn’t have scar our eyes by looking at desert everywhere (due to the fact that Alexandria’s in the green Nile basin). We actually saw grass and farmland!
Our train left on Thursday night at 7, which means we cut ourselves a little short on time. And this is why. The time it takes to travel from our dormitory to our campus every morning is a quick one-hour. However the time it takes to travel from our campus to our dormitory after classes takes about twice as long due to traffic and psychotic drivers (one of our school buses hit a tractor last month going full speed when the tractor decided to cross the street directly in front of the bus.) Anyway that’s a different story.
My class ends at 4:30 on Thursdays, the next bus leaves at 5. Leaving me two hours to get back to the dorms and take a cab to the train station. Luckily the bus only took 1 hour and 30 minutes that day. Leaving 30 minutes to get to the station. We hopped in a cab and got stuck in traffic on the bridge crossing the Nile for about 20 minutes and arrived at the square where the train station is located at exactly 7. But of course that would be too easy. First we had to hop a fence and play frogger across three huge streets in order to make it across the square. We managed to do that in 5 minutes and ran into the station just as the train was leaving. So we had to run and hop onto the train (luckily before it had picked up much speed) than nudge our way through about 10 train cars before we found ours…then we had to kick some men out of our seats. But we did it, and made it to Alexandria at about 10 pm.
The next day we walked up and down the Mediterranean most of the day and made it to Qaitbay Citadel which is basically a castle, and explore that for a few hours. We found some tourists who were on a cruise in the Mediterranean…and Peter immediately started talking to a few men about religion and politics (yeah). So I started a separate conversation with their wives who were looking about as uncomfortable as I was.
After the Citadel we walked to the new Alexandria Library, which opened four years ago. It only cost 2 Egyptian pounds to enter (about 40 cents) because we’re students in Egypt. This is about ten times cheaper for people who aren’t students. The library was packed with students sitting everywhere studying. We weren’t allowed to bring our own books into the library, which didn’t matter because the library probably had whatever we wanted to bring inside. It was huge and doubled as a museum. So we spent a few hours there. Unfortunately it was Friday (holy day) so the library closed earlier. So we walked back and ate pork for the first time in 2 months at a Chinese Restaurant on top of a hotel overlooking the Mediterranean.
The next day we wandered around Alexandria’s streets before catching a cab to Pompey’s Pillar. Pompey’s Pillar is the name of the only part of the Ptolemaic Temple of Serapis that was left standing after the Christians invaded the temple 1700 years ago. The temple also doubled as the second library in Alexandria, containing 700,000 scrolls. Unfortunately the first temple of Alexandria was completely destroyed leaving no remains. After we got tired of looking at a pillar (with two random sphinxes thrown in for tourists) we walked to the Roman catacombs.
The catacombs were built for a family in the second century AD, and were used for three hundred years to accommodate more than 300 hundred corpses. Unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures, but I’ll try to be descriptive.
The catacombs were discovered accidentally in 1900 after a donkey disappeared through the ground. They are 35 meters deep and contain 25 chambers, including one large room called the Triclinium, used as a banquet hall for paying last respects to the deceased. The lowest level of the catacombs are flooded with water, but the level we were able to explore only got soggy in a few areas, and was well lit.
After leaving the catacombs we walked to the Roman Amphitheatre discovered fairly recently when ground was being cleared for an apartment complex on top of it. So we sat in the theatre for about an hour, and made a friend with a cat. Evidently it is the only Roman amphitheatre in Egypt.
Unfortunately the only ruins in Alexandria were the ones we visited, meaning there aren’t that many to see. However there are excellent dive sites right off the coast of the city where a lot of ancient Alexandria is now located.
After the seeing amphitheatre we took a train back to Cairo and were welcomed by smog, dust, noise, and traffic!
