Alexandria's culture-ish

We made it to the station with enough time to have the customary morning shot of Lipton served by men in striped shirts and bowties reminding me of something out of an old movie complete with the old-fashioned Grand Central train station. I tell Jeremy "Egypt's made me a tea drinker," because I've decided even Lipton is better than Africa's substitute for real coffee, the instant Nescafe. In Egypt, Lipton is probably a bigger brand than Coke. Lipton tablecloths fit snugly over the outside cafe tables while men smoke their shisha (or hookah), and the tea's posters adorn the small sidestreet makeshift grocery stores. Walking the streets you see guys carrying trays full of glass tea cups around to the security guards and police who can't leave their posts (almost every street corner is home to a permanent rotation of uniforms and guns; strangely commonplace until it suddenly started to seem excessive, but all apart of the country's martial law and its attempt to maintain a sense of security).

So we boarded the train for the two-hour trip to Alexandria, a city founded in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great when he was 25 located on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Even though the weather was nice--in the 60s--it is winter in Egypt (and cold by Dakar standards by the way). Compared to how it can get in the summer months, we pretty much had the place to ourselves -- cheap hotel prices, half-deserted tourist sites, and our walks on the corniche were fairly unhastled from vendors (only one little girl who was determined to sell Jeremy a package of tissues).

The Corniche at sundown.

It's a city that combines a lot of cultures. Egypt does that anyway, but it's even more evident in Alexandria since it was once part of the Roman Empire, once the capital of Graeco-Roman Egypt, and much later it was a landing stop for both the French and the British. Visiting the catacombs, a sort of underground tombyard started during the 1st century and used until about the 4th, it was striking to see the combination of art techniques used to carve the sculptures and pictures alongside the tombs (a practice often done in Ancient Egypt to commemorate someone's life). From the grapes and vines of Greek art to the Roman s-curve in a statue to wall drawings depicting the Egyptian gods producing this imaginary dialogue, "Well, boss, which do we use?" or maybe they were just trying to pay homage to all cultures of the time. One statue carved into the wall of the tomb was a combination of a dragon from Greek mythology and a python from Ancient Egyptian beliefs with the tour guide's limited English description, "It's nice. Nicer than nice. It's nicety nice."

This is the main tomb with the dragon/python carvings on each side of the entrance. Not my photo, but one I took from the internet because I wasn't quick enough to smuggle my own camera in.

The indirect sea view from our hotel room balcony. Not bad. The real treasure was the secret watching of people in the windows across, and taking breakfast with the sun peeking through the buildings barely keeping warm in the Mediterranean's version of winter air.