Alexandria

Today we just returned from a wonderful weekend trip to Alexandria. We left Thursday night, taking the express train--which, given how fast it travels, is rather optimistically called the "turbini"--arriving in Alexandria at around 9pm. From the train station we walked to the water, where we promptly realized that we'd gotten off one stop too early, and that downtown Alexandria was still 3 or 4 km to the west of us. This prompted us to take our first microbus ride in Egpyt, which was fun in a slightly hairraising kind of way. Ubiquitous in Cairo, microbuses are small, boxy vans designed to hold about 10 passengers, but which you can often see holding almost twice that number. (They also often load and unload without fully stopping. But they're really cheap!) Anyway, we managed to find the main square, and checked into our hotel. Called the Hotel Crillon, it was nice enough, if a little bit small and dingy. The important thing is that it was cheap, served breakfast, and was located right on the Corniche (the roadway and walkway that run along the water). Also, the manager and the two bellhops (whose uniforms looked rather comically like monogrammed pajamas) were extremely nice.

Over the course of our two days, we managed to see four interesting sights. Friday morning we started the Catacombs of Kom ash-Shuqqura, which are apparently the oldest surviving Roman burial grounds in Egpyt. Our guidebook reports that they were discovered in 1900 when a donkey cart servicing other excavations suddenly fell underground! The catacombs consist of a vertical circular shaft, off of which there is a main tomb, a hall where last rites were performed, and a maze of passageways for more bodies. All in all, the complex housed about 300 bodies, which doesn't seem like all that much given how much digging it must have required. The most interesting aspect of the catacombs was the weird mix of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artistic themes in the decorative carvings. From there we walked over to Pompey's Pillar, which, confusingly, apparently has nothing to do with Pompey, but once supported a statue of Diocletian. Anyway, its a huge pink pillar surrounded by some very rather indistinct ruins of a temple and a Roman cistern, which an overly friendly member of the Egyptian tourist police insisted on leading us through.

In the afternoon, we walked on the Corniche around the harbor to a 16th-century Mamluk fortification called Fort Qaitbey. The famous Alexandria lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, once stood on the spot where the fort now lies, helping fishing and trading boats keep track of the location of the harbor. For a structure that is half a millennium old, the fort is very well preserved, and we had a lot of fun exploring it. (It reminded me a lot of clambering around ruined castles as a kid on a family vacation to Scotland.) Claire has lots of great pictures of it, some of which she'll post.

Which brings me to the one big disappointment of the weekend: I lost my camera. It was completely my own fault, but that doesn't make it feel any better. As we got into a cab, I took it out of my pocket so that I wouldn't sit on it, and then when we got out I only remembered it moments after the cab had driven away. This is particularly frustrating because I hadn't been able to download any of the pictures I had taken thus far here, since I left the requisite cord at home. And of course, that cord is arriving in a package that we are expecting to receive any day now. Such is life. Fortunately, Claire has her camera, and she has almost all of our really good pictures anyway. I can get a new one here very soon, but it still sucks.

I have a few more random thoughts about the trip and the contrast between Alexandria and Cairo, but this post is plenty long enough as it is, so I'll save them for later.