Egypt by Mo: Day on the coast

Note: every picture that was shot besides the museum were from someone elses camera. My memory card got loose so it didn't save a lot of cool shots, but thanks to Chris for the pictures.

Another week has gone by and I have a lot to talk about and have seen so many cool things. I apologize for not keeping this up to date a little more, but it seems that there is not enough time in the day to go to school, finish homework, explore Cairo and write about it to share, so with only a week left in this City I figured I should post a few stories and a lot of pictures that will hopefully hold you over and so stay tuned because with a week to go, I’m gonna rock it to the wheels fall off.

So now to the good stuff. School has been going great and I have learned so much it’s hard to keep it all straight. I also continue to meet a lot of great people both with school and around town. I have a guy in my class named Christian who is from California and who I’ve not only been going to school with but hanging out and exploring Cairo and other parts of Egypt. There is also a great lady that I met from Spain who is going to the same school and her husband are also staying in the same hotel as me so we have been going to dinners and planning trips together. That being said with the weekend approaching we decided to go to Alexandria for the day. I was going to go by myself and mentioned the idea to them and Otencia, her husband “Nacho”, and Christian all planned a trip last minute to the coast and to see the sites of Alexandria.
Now of course the story wouldn’t be complete without a little “hick-up” or something to detour us and that’s pretty much what happened this trip also. The original plan was to take a train in the morning and arrive in Alexandria after a two hour trip. Sure enough we go to get our tickets and they were sold out. Now for those of you who don’t know like we didn’t, August 23rd is an Egyptian national holiday like our 4th of July to celebrate independence so Alexandria is a pretty popular beach destination for the locals and travel by train is a popular form of transportation, so we had to take a time out and come up with plan b, which is pretty much what my life consist of so no big deal.

Here we are talking about what we are going to do and magically a guy appears out of nowhere and asks if we are trying to find a ride to Alexandria. Some crazy Jedi mind trick I guess but we were all for it and found a driver to take us out there for a small price of 600LE for the four of us. Now I’m sure by now most of you that are reading this have seen the post about the taxi driver and this trip was no different as far as speed and traffic only there were four of us crammed in the car together and it was a two and half hour roller coaster ride. I knew what to expect but Otencia’s husband just got there the night before so he was freaking out the whole time, and it was pretty entertaining although on the way back it finally was enough and I was able to brush up on my Spanish curse words when he started yelling at the driver.
We arrived in Alexandria about 10:30am and started at the museum to get a little history lesson in and although it wasn’t as big as the Cairo museum it had a lot of great info about the different cultural influences like the ancient Egyptian empire, Roman, Islamic and Ottoman (I think on the Ottoman part, could be Byzantine and those could be the same for all I know, I just look at the pictures). After the museum we zipped over to the old Roman Theatre that was right in the middle of town and even though some parts were reconstructed, there were still some dig sites going on and it was pretty surreal.

The next stop on our trip that we pretty much just put together in the car was the catacombs. This was the one place that I haven’t been able to take a camera in yet, which was a bummer, so I’ll go into a little more detail on what we saw. We got there and one of the guards got up and probably saw tourist dollar signs and took us on a tour. The roman catacombs were an underground graveyard and were one of my favorite things so far. You walk down a winding stairwell that is open in the middle like water well about 100 feet. When you get to the entrance at the bottom you find out why the stairwell is hollow and there is water at the bottom attached to a canal system in the catacombs. This well was to lower the dead and transport them to their final resting place via floating them to their tomb. This catacomb I was told was one of the biggest ever discovered and held approximately 150 people. Now my source on this might not be accurate since it came from a security guard that spoke very little English so I apologize. My thought process is that I can do all the research when I’m sitting at home some day, but there is limited time to see the sights so I encourage all of you to check out the web if you are interested in learning more about it, because I will definitely do that when I get back. So the catacombs were amazing. There were tombs which had all been excavated so there were no bodies, but you got to see a lot of the open chambers in the wall, where the bodies were kept. There was also a room that was for the families to pretty much have the funeral. We were told that they would have a feast down there and sit around and celebrate/morn. There were a couple of things that stood out and one that I thought was pretty interesting was that they had a horse catacomb in the same place as the humans for the horses of the humans that had past. The other thing that caught my eye was that even though it was a Roman burial ground there were a lot of pictures of Egyptian and Roman gods etched into the walls. Very cool site and all though it doesn’t look impressive on the outside if you ever get a chance to go to Alexandria, go see this.

The day was getting shorter and we wanted to pack everything in so after grabbing a delicious fresh seafood lunch we were off to go see the site of one of the ancient wonders of the world. The ancient lighthouse no longer stands, but there is the Citadel that sits overlooking the ruins. We got there around four just as the Citadel was closing so we didn’t get to go in but got some good pictures and just being there overlooking the Mediterranean was a cool experience. I did get some mango ice cream so it was all good.

With the driver wondering when we were going to leave we made a deal and told him that we were going to go grab a drink and some Sheesha and we would call it a day and head back to Cairo. We told him to meet us at the Library and after grabbing a drink we were standing outside the library we had originally tried to start our day there but being a national holiday we were told it was closed, but like most things in Cairo you can never believe what you hear the first time so make sure you ask a few times and take the majority answer. It turned out that it was open and we got a chance to go inside. The ancient library was long gone but this was pretty impressive and very modern looking. Now many of you are probably sitting there with your jaws hanging saying to yourselves “did he go into a library for fun” and the answer is yes! I’m all about the history and it was a very impressive thing to see. After an eventful day we headed back to Cairo around 7 so we were able to fit a lot in.

Greek Santa

Mosiac, each color is made up of little stones. thousands of stones to shade the face.

This translates to: "If you want to go to Alexandria grab your walking stick, it's safer than a taxi."

The original Pimp cup

This shield was detailed on every part. Scene of an angle and demon fight. Sorry for the bad picture.

Cofin...like you needed me to tell you that.

These are where the mummies body parts were stored. Brains, stomach, liver, etc. where stored in these. I think the heat made them boil out a long time ago, thats the black stuff...lunch anyone?

different layers of a coffin...that one you probably needed me to tell you.

This door had thousands of little pieces of ebony and ivory (not the Michael Jackson and McCartney album cover) put together in a wood door. very detailed, which you can't tell by my blurry picture.