Saturday, 2/28/09
I am up at 6, dressed, eat breakfast, and make a quick trip to the corner ATM. It is cool this morning, and gray. Manal and a driver arrive in a small white van at exactly at 7 AM. As we head out of Cairo, Manal introduces herself again, and reviews the itinerary for the day. The trip will take about 3 hours depending on traffic. We are going to visit the Roman Theater, the pillar, the catacombs, and the library. Manal and I exchange some small talk. She just got married February 3rd. It was a small wedding with 25 family members. She and her husband had been engaged for 3 years, he works in IT. They did enjoy few days in Alexandria for a honeymoon. She says she loves her work. She speaks Italian in addition to English. She spent 4 years learning the languages and another 2 years in Antiquities school. She has never traveled outside Egypt, but Insha’Allah maybe someday, now that she is married. I show her some pictures of my family-- she can’t believe how old my boys are-- and then we settle back for the long ride.
Immediately outside the city limits there are small farms, most seem to be growing a green leafy grass that I have seen fed to the horses and donkeys. Then we are passing through dessert. There appear several upper-class types of developments that are in every stage of construction, but I only notice one that appears to be completed and occupied. They all advertise the good life: shops, pool, luxury living…and all the models/actors, children and adults, in the advertisement are European/American—lots of blond hair and blue eyes. I find that very interesting.
Half way into the trip we make a stop at a travelers center for a coffee and toilet stop, then back on the road. Now I am starting to see farms and orchards along the road. There are olive trees, orange trees, grape vines and banana trees. The banana trees have blue plastic bags hanging in them. Manal says they are put over the bananas to speed ripening. You can tell that the area gets more rain, I guess from the coast. And as if to confirm that, it starts to rain just outside Alexandria.
It rained the whole visit, sometimes it even poured, so I saw a very wet Alexandria and didn’t explore much outside the van other than the stops. At each stop Manal would explain what I was to look for and give me some background history. I wasn’t allowed to take my camera into the catacombs, but I could everywhere else. Because of the rain, we really didn’t spend much time at each place or we would have been soaked. The Library was the exception as that was all indoors. In addition to the architecture of the library, there was also a small museum celebrating the work of Egyptian film director Shadi Abdel Saleh that was very interesting. The driver did find a spot to stop on the Corniche briefly so I could doge raindrops and get a few photos. It would be nice to come again, in nicer weather of course, and explore the town on foot. It does have a very different feel than Cairo, a little bit of old world Mediterranean.
It rained for half of the ride back to Cairo, too. They really don’t have road drainage systems, on the highway or in the city, so large puddles do appear, and some are quite large and deep. We make a coffee-restroom stop at the halfway mark, and as we sip coffee and tea, the skies open up and it poured. Thank goodness it subsided before we had to head back to the van. From there the rain dissipated and it was dry the rest of the way, we even saw a glimpse of the sun. But the wind had been strong all day and by the time we got to Cairo the air was so full of dust it was hard to well if it was cloudy or just dust.
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