Alex pt. 3 - The long awaited anti-climax

I'm currently publishing this from a pay-by-the-hour internet computer in mine and Dylan's awesome hotel in Dubai. It is currently 3:28am here. Why am I up so late? Because I was doing some awesome clubbing in Dubai? Because I was base-jumping off the Burj Khalifa? Yes? No. Because I'm working on a Grad School application for a two-year Masters Arabic program that comes with a fellowship to cover the tuition and the living costs for the second year of the program when you are in Damascus. And because I decided to do this at 5 in the morning before Dylan and Eleanor came. Turns out this is maybe the worst timing ever. Alas.

Anyway, here's a little somethin somethin about my long passed trip to Alexandria.

Sculptures outside the new Library of Alexandria

I don't know what took me so long to put up this post as it wasn't even that long of a day thanks to the, shall we say, unhelpfulness of a particular ticket seller in the Alexandria train station. Generally I found most Alexandrians to be like those two young guys in the streets whom I initially tried to blow off by speaking Spanish: helpful, friendly, occasionally wanting a picture with me, and much more patient with silly foreigners than Cairenes. Unfortunately, the ticket seller in Alex was not like these other more pleasant Alexandrians. We got up early-ish thanks in part due to the insistence of our unwanted travelling companion, Rachel (actually we were planning on doing this anyway, but she made a big passive-aggressive fuss about it...) and headed over to the train station to get our tickets back to Cairo. The plan was to take a late train back and get to some of the last tourist sites done while spending a good part of the day at a beach. Now, in case you've forgotten thanks to this blogger's non-chronological blog posting, we had not yet been to the glorious beaches of Sinai, so we'd all been savoring the thought of a relaxing beach day as a change from our city lives in Cairo. Thus, you can imagine our shock and disappointment when the first ticket seller we talked to informed us that every train, except for one at 2pm, was sold out. It would seem that Rachel, to my chagrin, had been right to have been complaining that we hadn't gotten our tickets yet. Curses!

With seemingly no other options available our group started buying our tickets for the 2 o'clock train while sullenly working out a new plan for our day. Luckily, Nav and I seemed to have the same thought something along the lines of: "wait a second, this is Egypt..." We exchanged suspicious glances, started to say "Maybe we should..." at the same time, stopped, and then ducked the queue separating ticket booths to talk to the other ticket seller who had no customers (which maybe also should have been a clue). I asked him if there were any trains with free seats later than 2pm, and he gave a sort of pitying look like, "Yeah dude, why wouldn't there be?" and said yes, at 7:30pm. We got our tickets changed to 7:30 after little righteous indignation on our part and a short conversation between the two ticket guys which I couldn't hear but which I imagined was something like this:

-Actually helpful ticket seller: "Dude, wtf? Why'd you tell these kids there were only seats on the 2 o'clock train?"
-Dickhead first ticket seller: "I dunno man, they were buggin me with their horrible pronunciation and convoluted grammar constructions...and...stuff..."
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "...You just had the 2 o'clock train page open on your computer and didn't want to change it, didn't you?"
-Dickhead ticket seller: "Well yeah! And I was really busy moving these papers in this stack over into this other stack! Didn't they see that??"
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "I don't even know why you have stacks of paper, man. All we do is sell tickets for the Alexandria-Cairo train route. All we do."
-First ticket seller: "Me neither, man. Me neither...But didn't they see that I had them?! And why'd you have to go and tell them about the other train? Now I have to change their tickets! GOD."
-Actually helpful ticket seller: "You're an idiot."




And so it was, relieved to have only about 2 hours less than originally planned, we decided to skip our planned visit to some ex-royal gardens somewhere and go straight to the beach. Because all the beaches are not actually on the part of the coast in the center of Alex, you have to go East or West. We chose East on the recommendation of our trusty Lonely Planet guidebook as there was supposed to be a particularly good (yet cheap!) private beach that way. The free public beaches were out of the question, as those are for the more conservative, anti-bikini Muslims, but the beach we chose only ended up costing something like LE10 each, and the long cab ride east along the Corniche afforded not only some beautiful views of the ocean and beaches, but also some really interesting snapshots of the city. Driving along I got to see some of Alex's bigger buildings and interesting restaurant areas, but I was most pleased to see how many random public aesthetic additions there were along the road. With fountains and murals and sculptures and a number of other art installations, Alex really seemed to show that it was a serious city trying to not only take care of itself, but also to nurture and encourage some culture...unlike Cairo. The capstone of this cultural self-improvement we would be visiting later that day, but first...


the beach!

Our cab entered what clearly seemed to be a new, upscale exurb of pricey condos and apartments. The streets were unusually clean by the standards of most Egyptian cities I've been to, and nicely manicured and arranged palm trees gave the feel of a Miami neighborhood. We found the boardwalk entrance and walked past a number of beachy snack shops to our beach's entrance. After getting our tickets one of the attendants brought our chairs and umbrella to the only spot left still on the water at the very end of the beach, and we set up. The girls, minus Rachel who, it turned out, couldn't swim, all quickly got in the water and i soon joined them. I'd been hoping to spend the morning doing lots of walking around and exploring before I became a beach bum, so as soon as I got into the cool water, I decided to swim down farther east to get some exercise and see what was going on down the coast on the other beaches.

My little swim turned into about two and a half hour affair as I got distracted first by an international kayaking race that was being held, and then by what I realized were some prime body surfing waves. As I sort of childishly bodysurfed over and over, I couldn't help but be reminded of my best friend who taught me how to body surf in Hawaii in 9th grade. On my swim back up the shore to where I'd left the girls, I ran into an Egyptian boy--the only other person as far out from the shore as me--with whom a conversation quickly led to more childish fun for me. Afte exchanging the usual "Oh you speak Arabic?" frivolities, we were soon swimming back toward the land to gather his group of friends and a soccer ball to play keep away with. They were all apparently entry-level employees at a law firm in Cairo on vacation for the day, and I ended up goofing around and playing for probably another 45 minutes.

Now not to brag or anything, but just like in the cold spring of Abu Shrouf (outside Siwa) when our driver (foolishly!) challenged me to a race, I seemed to have a pretty solid advantage in my swimming abilities. Is it fair to say that Egyptians, handicapped by their desert upbringing, are not especially good swimmers? Maybe I'm inclined to say yes. But they sure are fun sometimes anyway. After a nice long swim back to my friends, I was good and ready for beach bumdom. The girls were slightly worried at best, even though I had been gone for almost a good 3 hours. They were "JUST starting" to get concerned. I chose to believe it was out of faith in my swimming abilities. Ha.

After a nap and some snacks, we rinsed off and headed to the library of Alexandria about half of the way back to our hotel from the beach. Outside the library were sculptures and sort of decorative pool of water between the library and the corniche, and there were plenty of tourists and Egyptians alike going in and out. Many of them were quite friendly and it was as I was trying to squeeze by a group of girls excitedly asking Julia questions that I accidentally bumped into a little boy. I said something innocuous like "excuse me" in Arabic as he looked at me, and attempted to keep walking only to find myself suddenly surrounded by a whole crew of boys. One boy saw I was holding a camera and gestured for us to take a picture (why are Egyptians so fond of having their pictures taken with foreigners on the the foreigners' cameras? I don't know...), which immediately turned into...well...this:

Thanks to Nav for taking such a cool picture with such awesome lighting.

After extracting myself from the raucous boys we made our way over to the ticket office. As luck would have it, we were given the Egyptian price for our tickets, I think because we were speaking Arabic and some of the girls look passably Egyptian, but we were dismayed to find out that you are not allowed to bring outside books into the library, ruining some of our group's plans to do homework. I think we all enjoyed walking around the gigantic bestepped library anyway. I don't think I can really properly describe it adequately, so I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

One of the coolest things about the library, far beyond its stunning interior and its obvious dedication to improving the city, was its partnership with this project called the Internet Archivethat I found totally awesome. The Internet Archive has archived and kept copies of every public webpage since 1996, and the Library of Alexandria has a mirror of the whole archive on its website--the only one of its kind. In other words, the Library of Alexandria is again one of the biggest repositories of information in the whole world. Thousands of years ago, the Library of Alexandria was probably the first library that purposefully attempted to amass a collection of books from around the world and its scholarly atmosphere gave birth to the scientific method. I think the new Library of Alexandria is worthy of its predecessor's esteemed title and place in history, and what's more I think it will do good things for Alexandria and Egypt.

After an hour of contentedly wandering the peaceful library (listening to the Arcade Fire on my ipod the whole time), we met back up and went to grab a quick dinner before our train back to Cairo. Sitting on the train waiting for it to leave the station, I was all ready to study some Arabic notecards until I fell asleep when an Egyptian man sat down in the empty seat next to me. I could feel him watching me with my note cards, but it wasn't until I got to the flashcard for the word that meant "means" (as in a means of communication) that he started to talk to me by asking what the English word meant. Our conversation quickly turned to other things, and we ended up talking the entire train ride back in a mix of Arabic and English. Unfortunately I can't remember many of the particulars of this conversation, but he did express to me, as many other Egyptians have, his disgust and annoyance with the Egyptian government under Mubarak. He also shared his view (and what he portrayed as most Egyptians' view) on retirement, as well as why it is American youth always are portrayed working in restaurants in movies and television shows. "What is it? Is there a lot of money to be made in American restaurants or something?" he asked. Struck with a little bit of confusion over why it actually was that I and so many of my friends had worked in restaurants, I responded with a half-explanation about how American servers get tipped more because they are actually expected to do stuff. Rather than offending him, to my surprise, he agreed and complained about how the often apathetic and unhelpful waitstaffs in Egyptian restaurants annoyed him too. We touched on some bigger issues about the different ways that Americans and Egyptians approach their life and their work, but I'll save some of these more academic thoughts for another day perhaps.

Looking back, this was a rather pivotal conversation for me during my stay in Egypt as it was really the first great conversation I had with an Egyptian using my Arabic, and it set me up for the really great conversation I would have a few weeks later in the clothing market of Wikalat al-Balah. It was a perfect capstone to what had been a really nice trip to Alex, and it left us all wishing--in vain as it would turn out--that we could come back again soon. Hopefully I get to see this kind of sunset again soon:

Yes, I know I have a habit of ending my posts with pictures of sunsets...I realize it's cheesy, yes.