Alexandria

I went to Alexandria this weekend with a horde of people from AUC. After an interminable bus ride we arrived in the city, dropped all of our stuff at a hotel, and went to the beach, because that's pretty much what everyone does when they go to Alexandria.



Hey look! The Mediterranean! The shoreline of the city curves a fair amount, so you can see it in the distance there. Neato.

I meant it when I said that everyone goes to the beach when they to go Alexandria. The city, or at least the seaward half of it, is essentially a massive resort with an Egyptian flavor. The Egyptian flavor means that everything is extremely overcrowded.



As I said, it's overcrowded. It actually wasn't that bad here - we were at a private beach. The public beaches have significantly denser thickets of umbrellas. A small sidenote on that topic - I learned the Arabic word for umbrella today, and it's derived from the word for the sun. If you wanted more emphasis on the Middle East not getting a lot of rain, there it is.

Though I suppose the English word umbrella implies shade, not protection from the rain. Whatever. It's still interesting. Back to Alexandria.



Look! Another skyline.

I'd heard from various sources before coming that Alexandria was much more of an 'international' city than Cairo - more European influence, more Europeans, etc. That international flavor certainly exists in Alexandria, but it comes across as something that has been forcibly injected into the city by outside forces rather than a voluntary comingling of cultures. The body of Alexandria, much like the body of Cairo, consists of 4 million poor* people crammed into a city that really can't contain, much less provide for, all of them. International elements have been deposited in Alexandria in an attempt to connect the city to the Mediterranean and European cultures, but I don't know that the attempt has succeeded.



The new library, replacing the more famous Libraries of Alexandria that have repeatedly burned down in the past. While the building is very beautiful, very post-modern, and very large, it doesn't connect with anything else in the city. Native Egyptian architecture is very cohesive - buildings are various shades of brown depending on how long they've been standing, most are unfinished, and their focus is always on maximizing efficiency. I'm not sure that the new Library, however beautiful, will ever really feel like an Egyptian library.

*Poor doesn't accurately convey the average Egyptian lifestyle, because (at least for me) the word assumes a comparison to a large middle class. Egyptians aren't poor when compared to one another - the vast majority of the population has much the same standard of living. Those that don't, though... man.

My roommate went to a birthday party for the son of the Egyptian Minister of Transportation (or some such). The Minister owns a 22-story building in downtown Cairo, of which he rents out the bottom ten floors. The rest is essentially a personal palace.

For the people at the top of the pyramid, the system works great. For the people at the bottom, well... at least they've got company.