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15 April 2001 - Day 4 - Alexandria, Egypt Aungela and I were planning on staying in the Cairo/Giza area for a total of five days so we figured that we'd have enough time to see the major local sights as well as take a relaxing little train trip up north two-and-a-half hours to the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, once-home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world - the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria - and the formerly-destroyed-in-ancient-times-but-recently rebuilt Library of Alexandria. The night before our trip to Alexandria we had asked the concierge at the Marriott Hotel to give us the following day's train schedule for Alexandria, which he did, but once we arrived at the train station the next morning, we were rather surprised to see that there was no 9 a.m. train as we were informed there would be, and that the 9:30 a.m. train had already been booked solid and that we'd have to wait until 11:02 a.m. to get a seat in first class. "Why only first class?" you may be asking yourself. Well, namely because second class should be renamed Scary Class since you have to sit on hard wooden benches in these darkened early 20th Century train cars crammed full of people with partially covered rickety old windows that would have made us feel like we were taking a train ride strait to hell!. True, the experience would have been educational, but now that I'm no longer a cash-strapped university student I don't mind spending an extra $3 for first class transportation! |
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Left: our boarding pass. As you can see, the 150 minute first class trip cost us a scant 23 Egyptian pounds, or $6! Yes, the whopping extra 300 pennies for first class was most definitely not a budget breaker! So after taking a taxi from the hotel out to the scuzzy and rundown Cairo Trainstation, the taxi driver accompanied me and Aungela into the tickets-and-reservations department and grabbed us a couple tickets and set us up for our day's travel. (Tip for this service: 10 pounds / $2.50.) For the hour and a half before our train departed Aungela and I just sat at some random little cafe inside the trainstation where everyone stared at us unendingly and where we kept getting served these random deserts, which of course the cafe kept charging us for. I wasn't much in the mood for arguing with the bizarre customer service, so I just kept accepting and eating whatever they put on our table (and paying for it!). Once it came time for us to make our way out to the train platform for departure we walked up to the big old-style flip-card arrivals-and-departures board hanging in the middle of the main hall. I can read Arabic so it wasn't a problem figuring out the Arabic-only platform information posted on the board above us, but when Aungela and I looked at Platform 1, where the train was supposed to have been, there was nothing there but a pair of rusty old traintracks. Hmm. "This is queer." I thought to myself. "Our train is about to depart, but there's no train where the departure board says it should be." So then Aungela and I ended up walking from platform to platform seeing if we could find our train. The whole time all these older local Egyptians kept trying to "help" us find our train, but since Aungela and I weren't in the mood for handing out baksheesh (tips) to everyone, we just ignored them. Eventually we asked the ticket-collector at one of the main gates who properly directed us to our train and we boarded without problem and were on our way to the Mediterranean Sea. |
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The train pulled out of the station and the following pictures are just a couple images of what we saw along the way.
Above: crossing the Damietta Branch of the Nile River just north of the city Benha located in the Nile Delta.
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Above left: Aungela in the midst of a snooze. Above left: the Nile River Delta as seen from the train. An interesting aspect of the northern Egyptian landscape, not seen in the above picture, is the lack of completed apartment buildings. This is not to say that there is a lack of apartment buildings, but that the plethora of buildings located in the numerous communities along the railroad up to Alexandria all appear to be in the middle stages of their construction, even though they are completely occupied by tenants! It's a form of construction that I don't think I've seen anywhere else in the world. Basically you have all these four-to-ten-story high concrete buildings completely built except the top floor where you then see towers of unfinished concrete columns and steel support beams rising up and hanging off the uppermost completed floor. And virtually all the buildings in northern Egypt - at least anywhere within sight of the train tracks are in this exact state of incompletion, except perhaps for a few of the upper-class villas and mansions we passed by along the way. Prior to arriving in Egypt I had been told that they had this weird taxation system - originally crafted to protect landlords from excessive taxation during the construction phase of their properties - wherein they would not have to pay taxes on the structure until construction was completed. In the case of northern Egypt, it seems that people have used this tax law as a justification to never finish the construction of any of their buildings. It would seem to make for sense for the local Egyptian authorities just to repeal the law, declare that nobody has to pay taxes (since they apparently aren't paying anyways) and just demand that the apartment blocks be completed so these people don't have to live in ghetto-esque looking neighborhoods. But whatever, if living among this bizarre form of architecture makes them happy, then more power to 'em.
Left: Alexandria as written in Arabic (il-Iskandriya). You can read the letters from right to left: i-l-i-s-k-n-d-r-ya. Aungela and I eventually arrived in Alexandria around 1:20 p.m. though not without a hitch. Apparently there are two trainstops in Alexandria and not just one, so when we came into town and saw the majority of people getting off the train we thought, "Hmm. Maybe we should disembark as well?" So we hopped off the train, but I got a little concerned when I read a sign beside the train that said, "Garber Station" and was a little confused by the one-platform-nature of this trainstation which didn't look like a major trainstation whatsoever! So as our train rumbled back and forth waiting on the traintracks Aungela and I walked into a nearby Tourist Information office just a couple meters away and asked the nice woman behind the counter, "Um, is this Alexandria???" Just then we heard several loud noises coming from behind us and turned around to look out the front door and saw that the doors on the train were all beginning to slam shut and the train started pulling out of station! "That's your train! Go get back on it right now! GO GO GO!!!" the woman yelled! "Shukran! (Thanks!)" I hollered back, and we bolted out the door and started running along side the train which was beginning to gain speed! There was just one door left open on the moving train so I yelled to Aungela, "Grab onto the rail and jump in!" and she to successfully hopped in through the door and leapt up the steps and I quickly jumped in behind her just as our door slammed shut and the train whisked us away to downtown Alexandria!
We got out at the main trainstation in Alexandria and once we made our way outside of the building, we were surprised to find the the downtown area was an overgrown concentration of grubby apartment blocks and rundown roadways. This wasn't exactly what I was expecting from the city formerly ruled by Cleopatra, but I suppose a lot has changed around northern Egypt in the ensuing 2000 years. Aungela and I took a look at the map in our Let's Go Middle East guide book and were interested to see that there was an ancient Roman amphitheater located about 70 meters (yards) to our right. We grabbed hands, weaved through traffic to the other side of the traffic round-about and were greeted by what turned out to be a rather interesting architectural dig. The entrance fee was 6 pounds for me ($1.50) and 3 pounds ($.75) for Aungela since she had her student I.D. card. As for the ruins themselves, according to the one-lined blurb in my Let's Go book, "The 13 white marble terraces of the only Roman theater built in Egypt were discovered in 1964." That particular description doesn't sound too terribly exciting or enticing, but I was impressed to find some interesting ruins from both Roman and ancient Egyptian times as well as see that the amphitheater itself was still in pretty good condition. We ended up just strolling around the relaxed garden like park and enjoyed this nice little detachment from the rest of grubby, modern day Alexandria. Below: a few pictures from the Roman Amphitheater in Alexandria.
We walked around the amphitheater park for little while and then, after getting lost on our way out and barked at by the security officers when we tried to exit through the wrong gate, we trotted toward the Gold Market which Aungela had heard was located downtown somewhere near Faransa Street and the Shorbagi Mosque. When we walked down one of the narrow city center streets, we looked up at a street sign posted on a neighboring building's wall and noticed that we were walking down Daniel the Prophet Street! Who knew my name was so famous in Egypt! And for those of you interested in language, as I am: rue is French for "street", el-nabi is Arabic for "the prophet" and Daniel is me! In Arabic, from right to left it reads: shaari' al-nabi daanyaal. The three dots and the long line is shaa, the small line is r, the e-looking letter is a guttural vomit-sound we don't have in English, the next vertical line over is a/e, then the next vertical line (connected to the rest of the following word to the left) is an l, then the dot above is an n, then the dot below is a b, and the big u-shaped squiggle is a long ee/i sound. And the final word on the left is my name, d, aa, then the dot above is n, the two dots below are y, and the attached vertical line is aa, and the final letter on the left is l. And now you can read my name in Arabic!
We wandered through the downtown area, slowly being overtaken by mid-afternoon shadows, and window shopped for jewelry coming up empty handed until this random middle-aged man came up to us and convinced us to give his little jewelry shop a chance. Luckily for us (and him!) he had exactly what Aungela was looking for: several gold Egyptian style beetles and pendants. Once Aungela picked up all the gold she had come to Alexandria to get, we continued our stroll through downtown and headed out toward the Mediterranean Eastern Harbour about a kilometer to the north. |
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Right along the water front there is a nice, curved corniche (pronounced "kor-neesh") that was a long, slowly curving U-shaped roadway and pedestrian area that hugged the quasi-circular harbor for several kilometers (miles) in both directions. The first building we came to along the corniche was the above Roman styled Midan Sa'ad Zaghloul behind which was located the Mediterranean Sea. I'm not sure of the significance of the mini-monument, but I was impressed with the deep blue beautiful color of the sky in the picture I took below as it contrasts with the grey stone of the columns, so I'm glad to have seen it! |
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Above right: this picture is a bit humorous in that it makes Alexandria appear to be some swanky tropical resort where people just lounge around all day long on expansive beaches beside these thatched umbrellas sipping mixed drinks and enjoying the freedom which is Egypt. In reality, alcohol and public displays of flesh are extremely discouraged so there weren't any natives frolicking in the sun and fun. As a matter of fact, nobody was frolicking in the fun and sun of this particular beach, in part because the beach is only as big as what you see in the picture and because this seaside "resort" is located behind a very uninviting chainlink fence through which I poked my camera to take the shot! Don't get me wrong though, there were plenty of people walking up and down the corniche (men wearing pants and women wearing headcoverings) and there were children hopping in and out of the water on both sides of the "beach" in the picture, but at this beach, no-one was to be found except a stray man walking through the background.
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Neither Aungela nor I had any real plan of action for Alexandria so for the most part we just walked around enjoying the beautiful weather and watching the local Egyptians go about their business. As is also the case in Saudi Arabia, there were plenty of families walking around everywhere with children laughing and playing on the sidewalks. Unlike Saudi Arabia, there were quite a few apparently-unmarried couples meandering up and down the corniche, which I thought was really romantic. Below: Fort Qaitbey across the harbour.
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Aungela and I wandered along the seafront for about four kilometers (2.5 mi.) and came up to Fort Qaitbey, which is located right at the western most tip of the quasi-circular Eastern Harbour. Leading up to the fort was a long walkway with chairs for people to sit in and butting up against the sea was a concrete ledge where all of Alexandria's youth apparently hang out on Sunday afternoons. (Sundays are actually the equivalent of Tuesdays in the Western calendar.) |
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The fort itself was closed so we couldn't go inside, and since we were at the end of the corniche and had nowhere else to go on this side of the harbor we decided to kick up our feet just like everyone else and relax in the sun and the light breeze. Above: the picture to prove it! :-) And now, a little blurb on the historical significance of Fort Qaitbey's location on the site of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria as found in the 3rd Edition of Lonely Planet's Let's Go Middle East. |
According to classical accounts, the Egyptian coast was notoriously treacherous with hidden rocks and sand banks and a flat featureless shoreline offering little in the way of navigation aids. So it was that Ptolemy I ordered a great tower to be built, one that took a dozen years to complete and was finally inaugurated in 283 BC. The finished structure was of such massive proportions and of such a unique nature that ancient scholars regarded it as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
The tower became a lighthouse in the 1st century A.D. when the Romans added a beacon, probably in the form of an oil-fed flame that was reflected by sheets of polished bronze. In all, the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria withstood winds, floods and the occasional tidal wave for a total of 17 centuries. However, in 1303 a violent earthquake rattled the entire eastern Mediterranean from Egypt to Greece and the Pharos was totally destroyed. A century later the sultan Qaitbey quarried the ruins for the fortress that he built on the same site.
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Well, after our little waterside lounging session under the sun along the concrete coast of the Mediterranean Sea, we started walking back along the corniche toward downtown and then caught a cab to drive us 7 kilometers (4mi) around to the other side of the harbor so we could take a look at the new Library of Alexandria which has been rebuilt as a replacement for the famed ancient Library of Alexandria of yore which reportedly stood somewhere along the Alexandrian coastline several thousand years ago. As a matter of fact, I wrote a final examination paper on the ancient Library of Alexandria furing my last semester at university in my History of Mathematics class back in 1998. I ended up getting an A on the paper and a B+ in the class, a grade which then allowed me to graduate with my Bachelor of the Arts degree, move off to Japan and now Saudi Arabia and lead this ritzy international lifestyle of mine! Therefore I have a small, but not insignificant attachment to the Library of Alexandria, and when I read a year or two ago that a modern library was being built in Alexandria in commemoration of the original, I knew that I'd have to visit it if I ever got myself out to Egypt And voila, there I was.. I'm not going to go off on a big tangent about the library (since I've actually forgotten most of the details of my paper!), but the main thing to know is this: reports are conflicting as to whether the library actually ever really existed or not, but if it did, it was supposed to have been the greatest repository of knowledge in the African/European/Middle Eastern world 2,000 years ago collected from all parts of the Great Roman Empire. Depending on whose version you read or believe, the library was looted by thieves, burned to the ground by invading forces, or destroyed by natural calamity. Whatever the case, the original library hasn't existed for at least the last 15 centuries. In light of the new structure, it was good to see that the Egyptian Government is funding the construction of a modern, high-tech Library of Alexandria as a symbol representing the pursuit of knowledge. . . a pursuit which hasn't flourished much in the Middle East for nearly a thousand years.
Above: the modern Library of Alexandria, known in Arabic as Maktabat al-Iskandriiya. . . . still under construction.
We ended up circumnavigating the entire museum, which appears to be a new addition to the neighboring University of Alexandria, and checked it out from various angles. The curved back side of the library is clad in light gray stone with words from what appear to be all the known languages on Earth - past and present - to be etched into its exterior. As you can see in the images above, the front of the library that looks out toward the Eastern Harbour is a sloping facade of steel and glass, and right up front - behind Aungela and me in the picture left - is some big bizarre black ball with aluminium lines encircling it. The significance? I do not know. Once Aungela and I finished with the library, we started making our way back toward the trainstation along the corniche and swung by a hip little restaurant peopled by a group of young Egyptian men and women out for a little Sunday night meal of pizza and sandwiches. At our four-person table we ended up sitting beside a Western-ish couple who strolled in several minutes after us who were on a leisurely trip across Egypt and the Middle East for several months. The man was American - about 45 years old - while his wife (?) was in her late 20s or early 30s and from the city of Irkutsk in Siberia. I mentioned to her that I had studied Russian and had several friends/penpals from Irkusk when I was growing up but apparently she and her companion weren't too terribly interested. As a matter of fact, Aungela and I were both kind of rubbed the wrong way by them and weren't exactly sad when we parted ways. I got the feeling that the man was one of these not-so-uncommong international American types who's avoids other Americans like the plague while abroad, and that he and his girlie-friend were somehow up to no-good doing only God knows what all around the world since their coded and cryptic responses to our innocent conversation-starting questions seemed bizarrely secretive. WHAT*EVER!!! So anyways, the sun was quickly heading down toward the horizon which meant that it was time for Aungela and me to consider returning to the trainstation in order to catch our 7:30 p.m. train back to Cairo. Since we were a bit of a distance away from the trainstation we decided to flag down a taxi and just hitch a ride back which we figured would be much quicker. Well, as every one knows, even the best made plans can be lain to waste when you're in a foreign country and you have to try to communicate with a local taxi driver in his language. I do speak a little bit of Arabic so I confidently said to him, "ureed ath-hab ilaa-l-qatar" which I thought meant, "I'd like to go to the train." I couldn't remember the word for "trainstation" so I just used the word for "train" and figured he'd piece together my utterance and understand what I meant.
As we started driving through the now-darkening city I leaned over to Aungela and asked, "This part of town doesn't look very familiar, does it? We didn't come this way from the trainstation out to the harbor earlier this afternoon, did we?" "No, I don't think so." Aungela replied. "Hmm. I would assume this guy knows where he's going. He is the taxi driver after all. No?" I thought to myself. Well, yes, he did know where he was going, and I'm sure he knew exactly where he thought we wanted to go since I stated my intention clearly in plain but somewhat broken and accented Arabic. I said, "ureed ath-hab ilaa-l-qatar" but what I didn't remember until we started heading off way into the wrong direction of the city was that the word for "train" in Arabic is qataar - with an elongated aa - and that the word qatar in Arabic means Qatar, which is a tiny country on the far eastern side of Saudi Arabia about 1,500 miles away! The taxi driver was taking us to the AIRPORT and not the trainstation!!! So I yelled "Guff!!! Guff!" which means "Stop! Stop!" and finally was able to communicate that I wanted to go to Cairo and not the peninsular Gulf country of Qatar, and that we wanted to get there by train and not plane! So the taxi driver got off the highway, flipped a U-ee, and zipped back into downtown where he dropped us off at the dark and scary Alexandria trainstation where Aungela and I waited 15 minutes and then hopped on our return ride back to the wondrous and glorious Marriott Hotel in Cairo which greeted us with its clean and luxurious open arms like an old friend! :-)
Egypt Tour 2001 Links / Daniel's Links Megasite
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