After a slightly more leisurely breakfast than originally intended (it's Egyptian time...), we headed out. Nora and I were strong advocates of walking to our destination, the Pillar of Pompay, even though we knew it was pretty far south and we had no maps actually telling us where to go, and this is when the Rachel's quiet complaining began, quiet yet incipient. The not-so-subtle suggestion "we could just take a taxi" became the refrain of the day, even though everyone else was at least set on walking for a while. Thanks to a little democratic suppression of minority viewpoints, we walked. It ended up being about a two hour-long walk, taking turns and detours to look at interesting buildings, investigate enticing alleyway markets, and, occasionally, to ask for directions. I, for one, loved it. I've come to realize that I don't think I would be satisfied if I didn't finish at least one of my days in a new place exhausted from a full day of exploring all around. I really enjoyed when the Egyptians we asked for directions balked at our (my) determination to walk and tried hard to convince us to take a cab. In our journey, friendly Alexandrians would come up and speak to us (usually about nothing in particular), and I got to speak in Arabic with them.At one point two younger guys came up to me who I initially intended to ignore by telling them I was Spanish (Egyptians don't seem to usually know that language), but they ended up being very nice and helping us get back on our way to the Pillar. I realized as I was walking that telling them I only spoke Spanish was actually a good way to force them to speak Arabic with me. I began entertaining notions of pretending I was actually Spanish from now on (God forbid someone actually know Spanish since I've forgotten all but my kitchen vocabulary and some swear words mostly), but was distracted by an alley with a particularly exciting open air market that I basically forced our group to go through.
Only Rachel objected to another detour, and it ended up being a really beautiful place with lots of brightly colored fruits, fresh fish, and various other stuff that I didn't even recognize. Alexandrians hustled around kicking up dirt from the unpaved alley and haggled with the sellers over prices. Consistently here in Egypt, one of my favorite things has been going the places where Egyptians do double takes at seeing foreigners there. It makes me think maybe they respect me a little more. Wandering the sunny back streets allowed us to see the colorful (in the literal and figurative senses of that word) parts of Alexandria hidden away from the tourist drawing beach.Eventually, our journeying brought us to Pompay's pillar--basically all that remains of Alexandria's former architectural wonders. The pillar is flanked by some small sphinx-looking statues, though I can't tell you with too much certainty because we had to pay to get into the large walled-off area and didn't feel like it was worth it to just see a single big pillar--especially when we could just take pictures through the gate and get the general idea. Here is the picture I got:
Yep...it's a pillar.
From the pillar it was only a short walk to the other remnant of Alexandria's ancient civilization, the Catacombs. Basically the Catacombs are a big tomb complex (is "Necropolis" the right term?) that are really deep down in the ground. They're fairly ornate and impressive, though I'll admit, I found myself mostly wondering why I should care. Apparently they were only discovered by accident in the early 1900s when a donkey fell a hundred feet down the hole of the main entrance. The tombs actually extend further down into the ground, but are inaccessible because they flooded. Apparently Alexandria is not willing to splurge on pumps to clear out one of their only remaining great archeological sites.
A picture I was not supposed to be able to take...kind of the only part of the Catacombs I actually thought was cool. The rest of my less impressive pictures of the catacombs will be up on my facebook soon...
For me the most notable part of the Catacombs experience had to do with the rule that no cameras were allowed in, a fact that caused a problem for us as we were in fact all carrying cameras. I just snuck mine in in a small pocket in my shorts, but the others were initially asked to leave their cameras at the front gate, and then just their batteries. Most of us had pretty run-of-the-mill point and shoot Canons, but Rachel had a nicer, much more expensive DSLR, and she was not happy about the situation. Now, I should point out, Rachel doesn't even know how to turn the flash on and off with her camera and took maybe a grand total of 12 pictures throughout the whole trip, but all the same, she was irate at this development. She started berating the security guards--who were just enforcing a rule that was spelled out in many signs around the entrance--saying things like, "Do you KNOW how much this camera is worth?" and "If I come back and my battery is not here it will be a big problem," and then, after she finally left her battery and was walking through the gate, the guard said to her fairly apologetically, "Sorry," to which she snippily responded, "No you're not," as she walked away. Not only was I frustrated that she had been so impolite and made a bad situation worse, I was even more annoyed that she executed this whole fiasco all in English. Now I should add here, Rachel is in Nora's Arabic class, which is at least a level or two higher than mine, but she didn't speak a singular word of Arabic this whole time (nor throughout our entire trip for that matter). What's more, at various times throughout the trip, she would get angry with Egyptians who didn't understand her English.
Don't totally know what was going on here, but I thought I'd try and include some pictures to give a sense of what "normal" streets look like.
Rachel perked up once we headed down into the Catacombs and found out that Nav and I had both snuck our cameras in, so there would be some pictures despite her fit at the gate. After we left the Catacombs we decided we would grab some good old fashioned street food and then grab a taxi up to our next destination. The cab was partially a peace offering to Rachel, but more to do with the fact that our destination was all the way back up to our hotel and then another 40 minute walk beyond that. (On the map in the previous post, the Catacombs are at the very bottom of the map toward the left, while our destination was in the dotted circle at the top left of the map at the end of that unnatural looking arm of land sticking out into the sea.) I got what turned out to be some pretty questionable tasting kibda (a very common street food which I only recently found out, is beef liver) with deceivingly tasty-looking pasta. We thought it looked promising as the pasta vendors had been so numerous as we walked that it seemed like it might be some neat little specialty of Alexandria, but the noodles were super overcooked and the sauce tasted mostly like tomato juice, so I think not. Upon reconvening with the others, I found Nora seething after another of Rachel's tantrums. They had gone to what is your standard Egyptian food stand/small restaurant selling things like fuul (beans), falafel, fried eggplant, and then some meat things, and Rachel, who apparently has just been eating American food or at places with English menus mostly, freaked out when the menu was only in Arabic. Now let me say again, she is supposedly in a higher level of Arabic than I am, but I can easily read Arabic menus and find the aforementioned ubiquitous Egyptian food items. I don't even know what this girl has been doing in this country for the past two months. Anyway, Nora had to order for her, because she was so helpless.
As we were catching a cab, we got caught up in a crowd of uniformed Egyptian Elementary school students who presumably just got out, who quickly charmed us by repeatedly coming up to ask us what our names were in order to show that they knew some English. As the children stood around we caught and squeezed into a tiny cab (Egyptian cab drivers don't mind if you have 5 or even 6 passengers) and ended up taking what turned into a fairly lengthy ride thanks to the Friday morning traffic including a surprising abundance of horse-drawn carriages. Nearly a half-hour later we arrived at our next stop, the Qaitbay Bay (pronounced with a K in the back of your throat for the first letter and rhyming with "eye-it-bay").
The fort is a magnificent white color with an outer and inner wall system that surrounds a fairly large grassy promenade with white brick paths and palm trees. It was literally one of the cleanest places or things I have yet seen in all of Egypt, and it sort of heartened me after seeing the rubbage-filled Pyramids last month. Inside the 4-level fort they had installed only minimal artificial lighting allowing the strategically located holes in the walls to provide most of the light.
I didn't totally pay attention to the history of the fort, but I know it was built in the 16th century and was restored by the hugely famous Egyptian reformer, Mohammad Aly, in the 19th. More interesting to me was that the citadel was most likely built on the grounds of and from the ruins of the Great Lighthouse of Pharos (one of the 7 Wonders of the World) which had been destroyed many centuries before by an earthquake and repeated attacks. There were these giant, strangely shaped stone bricks in the waters around the fort and I liked to think that those were some of the other pieces of the Lighthouse.
The fort was quite crowded, though not overly much so, but I noticed that most of the other tourists there were Arabs which I found interesting. It seems a lot of Egyptians come to Alexandria for their holidays. A lot of the younger ones went around posing unabashedly in front of this and that part of the fort. It was pretty much indistinguishable from the Americans' behavior at touristy sites if not a little more over the top.
After the Fort we got some ice cream and then met with Shayna who was with her visiting dad. The seven of us headed to a restaurant that had come recommended by some Alexandrians, where, if we opted to eat seafood, they had us come to the back and pick out specifically which fish/crab/calamari we wanted to be eating. The crabs I got were underwhelming and annoying to eat (why did I get three?!), but the fish was probably the best fish I have ever eaten in my life. The Arabic name for it was like "Dinees" and so far no one (nor the internet) has been able to identify what fish this is, but it was delicious. This was the first time I've eaten a fish that was still intact, and I now know how people die by choking on fish bones--those things are sneaky. Anyway, it was quite the feast we had with seafood soups and a row of fish and a whole spread of sauces like tahina, hummus, baba ghanoush to go with the salads and veggies. And then the guy clearing the table insisted on clearing all the plates at once by making the most incredible stack of dirty plates I have ever seen in my 5 years of on-and-off waiting an bussing tables. This guy did not mess around.We had a confusing moment when we asked for the check and the waiters seemed a little perplexed and kept saying "finished" "finished" over and over again in Arabic and English. Eventually we discovered that Shayna's dad had generously opted to take care of the check without any of us knowing. Needless to say, this was awesome, but this was also a good example of the monopoly-money-effect that is hard to avoid when first dealing with low-value currencies. It feels like you're not spending anything, so you spend too much of it. After the first two weeks we had all adapted and now frequently scoff at meals that cost more than LE10 (less than $2), but then again, perhaps that's because we are unemployed.
When we walked out of the restaurant (after having some after-dinner mint tea of course), I noticed something I had not yet witnessed in Egypt. I've been hearing that one of the great Egyptian delicacies that I absolutely need to try is haram, or stuffed pigeon, and when I looked to my left I saw there was an Egyptian man standing in front of what looked like a large bamboo table frame. Inside the frame/cage table thing were probably a hundred pigeons whose wings must have been clipped because they were unsecured and yet couldn't seem to leave. Standing in front of the table was an Egyptian man doing what one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. He would reach down into a big bowl in front of him, put something in his mouth, grab a pigeon from his right, pull its face to his lips for a moment, hold the pigeon as it sort of twitched, and then casually put it down to his left only to start again. Now, I had never really devoted much thought to how exactly pigeons become stuffed, or even what being stuffed means, but this was really not what I was expecting. I tried to get some pictures without being conspicuous so I didn't get a shot any better than the one here.
After catching a couple of cabs (7 people is where a cab would draw the line on packing people in), we headed back to Shayna's hotel to drop her dad off and then we went to a pastry shop that the girls had found the night before. I didn't get anything--we all know how I generally feel about desserts--but I did take a picture of their very colorful and appetizing things that Shayna and Rachel got. We took our time at the dessert place while mulling over what we might do that night to explore the Alexandrian night life, and I considered getting more tea (I'm really into mint tea now, guys) before we headed back to the hotel to deposit some things and then head out. It was probably just a little after midnight when we finally left to go to another bar that had come recommended in the Lonely Planet book. The somewhat mysterious description for the bar had said that Thursday and Friday nights are more "alternative," so we thought there would be a lively nightlife. As it turns out, "alternative" means "gay night," and we waded through a thick mass of well-dressed men, some Egyptian and some European, to a back room table. It was smokey and cramped, but still kind of nice even though the girls had been hoping for a place to dance. When we left the bar an hour later, the streets were totally empty. Turns out that chill Alexandrian attitude also extends to their night life. Now we know for next time. I was pretty exhausted after our day of exploring (just like I like), so I wasn't all that disappointed to be going to bed anyway.
The next day was our last day in Alex during which we had a run in with dishonest Egyptian ticket salesman at the train station, headed to the beach, and saw the new, amazing Library of Alexandria. That post will be up later this week. Right now I'm laid up in bed still from some sort of lung-infection, but next weekend is going to be Halloween which Egyptians are either completely uninterested in, or insanely excited about. My friends are all planning on being Egyptian related costumes, but I'm thinking I'm going to be a Viking. Gotta put my beard to good use. Either way, I'm sure Halloween will be a post-worthy experience too. Alex Day 3 coming soon! Here's a picture to end on taken from Qaitbay of the Alexandrian harbor just before sunset:
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