Alexandria

I got back from my trip Sunday, and I’ve been a bit lazy about writing.  Because it was pretty long and I did a lot, I’ve decided to break it up into two parts so that, hopefully at least, no single post approaches the length of my Istanbul post.

The best way to get to Alexandria, north of Cairo on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, is by train, and so the morning I hoped to leave I went to Ramses Station near my office to get on a train.  It left at 11:00, and I was lucky to buy one of the last two tickets – all the trains were very crowded because it was a national holiday and a lot of people were going to Alex to go to the beach.  The woman who bought the last ticket, and with whom I ended up sitting on the train, was an Egyptian woman who had moved to Copenhagen thirty years ago to marry a Danish guy.  She was originally from Alexandria and was heading back there to visit family.

She and I ended up talking for most of the trip to Alexandria, about two hours.  In Tanta, a town half way between Cairo and Alex where we stopped briefly, she insisted I buy some of the town’s famous sweets from the vendors who frantically run onto the train during its brief stop and don’t jump back off until the train is moving again.  I bought a few, and they were pretty good; she bought one of everything.

While we were talking, she asked me where I was from and I told her America.  She told me about her one, extremely brief visit to America.  She flew into Atlanta a couple years ago to visit friends, apparently, and as she told it to me was harassed by the TSA people over her name – they didn’t believe she was Danish – and she made some sort of joke in response.  Apparently they didn’t like this and handcuffed and arrested her and put her in jail overnight before sending her back the next day to Copenhagen.  She showed me her passport and the comment that TSA had written in refusing her entry, citing some sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act.  I wrote down the citation and looked it up back at home, and it makes me wonder about the story.  The specific subsection cited in the refusal simply says that a person is inadmissable if they don’t possess a valid passport and visa.  I guess maybe they really didn’t believe it was her passport.

In any case, we talked most of the trip.  She was curious about what I was planning on doing in Alex, and she seemed sort of shocked that I was going without any idea at all where I was staying or what I would do.  I guess because she felt bad for me or something she decided that she would call me later that evening and take me to her favorite restaurant for dinner.  I said sure, though I didn’t know if it would happen or not.

I had been told by a number of Egyptians, all from Alex, that I needed to see the city.  That it was much prettier and cleaner and cooler than Cairo – Cairo paled in comparison.  So, I had some level of excitement in heading towards Alexandria.  As we approached the outskirts of the city, however, I began to doubt how much different the city could really be.  The buildings I began to see were of the same horrible, concrete style that is everywhere in Cairo, and their white or tan paint was covered with the same dark dust and grime.  Even the windows of the buildings had shutters that, like in Cairo, retained their factory green paint.

I don’t know whether it is romanticism or simply the presence of the ocean that makes some people believe Alexandria to be such a better or prettier city.  The city was, undoubtedly, once great – among the most cosmopolitan and literary cities of the world.  In the 1940s, Alex had 400,000 residents, of whom I believe 40% were foreigners.  Now, the city has over five million people and none of the cultural diversity that made the city vibrant in the past.  The many foreigners and Jews were chased out of the country in the 1950s, and the rapid population growth has manifested itself in the ugly concrete towers reminiscent of Soviet bloc cities.

When I arrived, I decided to first try to see the catacombs of Kom ash-Shuqqafa, which were supposed to be quite near the train station.  I walked for a while but quickly got lost and had a glass of tea at an ahwa while I tried to get my bearings.  I realized I’d walked further than I’d wanted to and decided to take a cab to the catacombs.  I had no sense of taxi costs in Alex, but I decided that since the catacombs were fairly near, I shouldn’t have to pay more than 5LE.  The first cab I asked, though, of course saw me as as tourist and said that the price was 20LE.  I said I’d pay 5LE, and he said that was not enough so I walked away, at which point he realized he was losing me as a customer and started shouting lower prices out the window.  I didn’t really want to give him my business, though, and walked to another cab that immediately offered a price of five pounds.

The catacombs are an ancient necropolis that was used around the time of Alexander.  It’s three stories, all underground, and there are big tombs carved into the stone along with sitting rooms and other halls where families could come to visit their dead relatives.  It’s dark and wet and, since I was the only person down there, quite creepy.  Unfortunately the pictures I took aren’t any good because they confiscated my good camera and I had to take the pictures with the small one, which didn’t have much success in the low light.  The weirdest part of the catacombs was this one room where there is a wood and glass case full of what appears to be a jumble of human bones.  There is no signage about this case, and there are no other signs or cases in the catacombs.  It’s strange.

After the tombs I had a cab take me to the water near the area where most of the hotels are.  I spent several hours trying to find a hotel – the good cheap ones were booked for the holiday, and most of the unbooked ones wanted way too much money for the ugly and dirty rooms I saw.  I finally ended up in a small hotel on the fourth floor of an apartment and office building in a tiny, not particularly clean room without a private bathroom.  It was 30LE – less than $6 – and clean enough that I didn’t feel gross, so I figured it’d work for the night.  When I came back later that night, there were other guests, all Egyptian families who I guess were visiting the beach.

With regard to the hotel, though, I wonder if somehow I got the worst room.  When I was leaving in the afternoon, the manager was showing rooms to this Japanese tourist.  When I came out of my room I couldn’t lock the door so the manager was helping with it, and the Japanese guy assumed it was a room for him to see.  The manager wouldn’t let him, and said something to the effect of the room being “for Americans.”  I walked by the other room the Japanese guy was seeing and it looked much bigger and nicer.

Most of the afternoon I just spent walking along the Corniche and sitting by the water.  It’s pretty and the breeze was nice, but all the beaches are overcrowded and, worse, full of trash.  I know I would not have been able to bring myself to swim at any of the beaches I saw in Alex.

In the evening, Mona, the woman from the train called me and asked if I wanted to meet for dinner.  We ended up going to a restaurant called Housny, which she said was her favorite in Alex.  It’s a huge three or four story restaurant gaudily decorated in the marble and gold and mirrors that are so common in somewhat upscale Egyptian restaurants.  The restaurant was incredibly crowded, and the waiters and managers and food runners were running and yelling and shoving all over the place.  The food, though, was really good – some of the better food I’ve had in Egypt.

After dinner, at about 11PM, I took a cab back to my hotel.  The corniche was about ten times more crowded than it was during the day, and so were the beaches.  Apparently everyone comes out at night in the Alexandria summers, and the street, for kilometers, looked like a giant party.

The next morning, after a sort of uncomfortable night of sleep in a lumpy bed, I headed out to catch my 8AM bus to Siwa.  I told my cab driver to take me to the “new bus stop,” which is where I’d been told to go when I bought my ticket the previous day.  I went expecting, I guess, an American-type bus stop with awnings and signs and some semblance of organization.  Obviously, this was naive.  Bus “stations” in Cairo tend to be places – corners or behind buildings – where buses and microbuses happen to stop.  The new bus stop in Alex is somewhat less haphazard than this, though.  It is a huge expanse of concrete full people and hundreds of buses, not to mention many more microbuses.  It took me quite a while to find where my bus company’s buses were aggregating, and longer than that to figure out what bus was supposed to be mine.  All the Egyptians, despite the total lack of signs, just seemed to know what buses to get on.  I don’t yet have such perceptive abilities.  After asking a number of people, though, I finally got on my bus and we headed towards Siwa.

(It’s worth noting that directly next door to this insane scene where buses stop seemingly at random in the hot sun there is what appears to be a completely unused bus station, with awnings and everything.)

The bus ride was interesting and long – about seven hours.  I sat next an incredibly whiny man who would yell at the driver every time he would stop or slow down.  At each of the two rest stops we stopped at to let people use the restroom or get tea, where we were told we would have fifteen minutes, he would start honking the bus’s horn after about five, trying to get on the road immediately.  The result of his honking would be for everyone to think they were going to miss the bus and rush back to their seats – everyone but the actual driver, who, knowing the bus couldn’t leave without him, would leisurely drink his tea for the remaining ten minutes of rest time.  Various people on the bus got off at random stops in the middle of the desert – each time, I couldn’t see a single building in any direction so I don’t know where they were going (one old man got off the bus in the middle of the desert carrying only a giant bag full of cases of Cleopatra cigarettes).  At the many, many police checkpoints, cops would get on and hitch a ride to somewhere else.  Occasionally, the non-driving bus employee would come down the aisles to check tickets as if someone could have gotten off or on while driving.

Eventually I made it to Siwa, though, and I’ll write about that later.