Sunday, February 5/2012

Qaitbey Fort, Alexandria

We're up at six for breakfast at 6:30 and our planned trip to Alexandria (€65 for a car and driver for the day). Breakfast the same as yesterday - except that Maggi has been at work in the kitchen and the cups are visibly cleaner and the breakfast tray not only washed but dried. Mohamed does give everything a quick rinse, but that seems to be more or less the extent of it. Not that things are necessarily different in posher accommodation. We remember watching a waiter in our hotel in Giza cleaning a handful of cutlery on the corner of a less than pristine tablecloth. We eat the white buns, foil-wrapped soft cheese triangles and jam but give the hardboiled eggs a miss. By the time they're done, and too hot to hold, it's time to go.

It's a very foggy start. The usual smog with a much higher fog component, so we leave hoping that there will be decent visibility for our day in Alexandria. As we hit the motorway, though, this rapidly becomes the least of our concerns. We pass, in the initial stages more incredibly ugly accidents than I have seen in the whole rest of my life put together, including a car crushed beneath an enormous semi (artic). The balancing wheels from the front of the trailer section have actually gone through the roof of the car. But this is only the beginning. For over half an hour we drive past accidents so numerous that we give up counting - cars crushed, folded almost in two, and torn apaart, and bodies by the side of the road, some of them not moving - faces covered. There is the occasional ambulance, but many of the vehicles look like survival would have been impossible. Occasionally a small fire has been started by the side of the road as a makeshift flare, but there is hardly any need to warn us - the road is one huge accident scene. The fog, of course, is the most obvious cause, but excessive speed for the conditions has clearly played a major part; the vehicular damage we see cannot have been inflicted at low speeds. Ashkok, our driver, is good - but he too is going fast enough that any exception on the road (which is a new one and good) could be problematic.

Alexandria is entered through a large portal with white columns and the city name engraved in Greek as well as Arabic. It's sunny and we snake through narrow, crooked lanes that hardly look as if vehicle traffic were possible Our first stop is at the catacombs. They were rediscovered in 1900 when a donkey fell into a hole which continued into three levels of catacombs with many little passages and a honeycomb of burial spots. The carvings are Egyptian but the catacombs obviously have mixed Egyptian, Graeco-Roman and Christian antecedents. About second century.

Then a stop at Qaitbey Fort on the sea. A fairy tale castle of a fort. It's an Islamic fort built in 1480, originally on the Island of Pharos, built on the remains of the lighthouse, but now part of the mainland, as silt long ago filled in the gap.

A quick snack at Gad, one of a chain of Egyptian fast food restaurants. Very busy, and so it should be as the local style food is good and very cheap. You decide whaat you want and then pay for it. The cashier gives you a receipt with your choice printed on it in Arabic, which you hand over at the counter in exchange for the food. Very clean as those preparing food don't touch the money. Two counters and a man at the entryway cutting meat from two large doner spits. Meat in a bun about $1.40 or spiced bean paste and tomato slices in a small pita for about 15 cents. Delicious too.

Then to the new Alexandria Library. the original livrary, of course, one of the highlights of the ancient world, but its successor is pretty impressive too. It opened in 2002, the work of a Norwegian architect who won a UNESCO competition. Strikingly modern and with room for 8 million books, as well as museums and a planetarium. M and I have drinks at a café nextto the library, the magnificent building in front of us and the corniche with the Mediterranean blue harbour behind.

Then J and I spend an hour at the museu, admiring sculptures recently retrieved from the Mediterranean as well as tiny tanaga statuettes showing period style and dress, and coptic paintings and fabrics. M goes instead with Ashkok for a coffee.  And back to Cairo, the road now more or less fog and accident free. Askok points out the large jail where Mubarekès two sons are being held.

We enjoy a second night at Felfela. this time itès not the anniversary of Mohammed's birth and we're allowed beer. Also sample the mixed grill and a delicious aubergine dish with a dash of (balsamic?) vinegar. Tala'at Harb Square is humming as are the streets around. Shops open and open air vendors busy even at ten p.m. on a Sunday evening. The protestors are busy later too. it must be aaround midnight when a huge cohort pass noisily under our window on their way, presumably, to Tahrir Square. And the net (wifi in the rooms here) has news of escalating protest southeast of us at the Immigration Ministry - barriers breached and stone throwing answered with gun pellets.