Alexandria Monday 3rd March

Here we were on our last day in Alexandria and about to leave Egypt. I felt quite down: I am fond of the way Egyptians are such communal people who are always ready to talk to strangers; I will miss the colour and the bustle and even the dug up pavements; I love the way history is present in so many aspects of modern life; and I felt that there was so much more to do here than the fantastic but definitely touristy things we had concentrated on. I was regretful that I didn’t put time into learning more than the basic phrases and to read numbers in Arabic. All in all, I didn’t want to go.

Keith had become very comfortable in Egypt and enjoyed the food, the friendliness of the people and seeing people from a different culture close up. He found it very confronting and uncomfortable to pass beggars in the street. He enjoyed the diversity that we found in Egypt from the hustle and bustle of Cairo to the solitude of the desert. His main concern to was to start our time in a Schengen country, and he was ready to move on.

We spent the day walking west along the Corniche. We visited the excellent little aquarium. One tank confirmed that the fish we had so admired at close quarters in the Red Sea, were in fact the ones that Najib had told us were poisonous lion fish.

We continued on to the Citadel, and this time we went in. It stands where the ancient light house, the Pharos, stood, and was a fortress. Walking around the battlement walls and looking through the windows you could see the excellent visual coverage and protection of the double ring of walls and battlements.

The main tower is three storeys high with a mosque in the centre. It was a labyrinth of passages and small chambers, one of which housed stone ovens. We couldn’t help thinking how our children would have loved to play there when they were young. In fact there were loads of children there – a noisy school group, teenagers mucking around big time on the battlements pretending to throw each other over into the sea, a kindergarten or crèche excursion (culture education starting early?), mothers with their children and numerous unescorted children who just seemed to be hanging about and playing. We stopped to read our guide book and were surrounded by 12 girls of about 13 who assured us that they had a holiday from school and who wanted to talk to us. We were celebrities for ten minutes before we set off again.

We went in search of the old quarter where there is still Turkish influence to be seen and where the streets are so narrow that no car can go there. As we walked through this area where goats roamed and people were going about their lives as they must have long ago, we were struck by the poverty and squalor and felt like voyeurs. Everyone stopped to stare at us and comments were passed. A girl of about eight was the only one to speak to us (very unusual in Alexandria). She followed us proprietarily for several streets. Eventually street vendors took the place of families on the road sides and we walked back into the interactions of commerce and greetings.

We tried to sleep before our trip to the airport at one am but, for me, it was very difficult. I was thinking about the difference between being a tourist and a traveller. About how we filled our days with visits to interesting places but how, after a while in one place, I think that I would need to find a way to be that was purposeful at a deeper level. We may have been coming to that time in Alexandria, and it would have been interesting to explore that stage there.

We had changed our Egyptian pounds to Euros, keeping a few for our grandsons, Frey and Yonah. Sadly I realised that I no longer had to have one pound handy in case I needed to go to the toilet, an obligatory tip for the attendant and the only way to receive a few squares of toilet paper. We kept enough money for the taxi fare – more than it was worth considering the distance, so surely I had learnt nothing about the ways of bartering and the conning of tourists. An elderly jockey-sized man with some sort of severe uncontrollable spasms drove us in a definitely unroadworthy vehicle to the airport. All the way I was hoping he would make it. He did, and after along wait we set off for Athens.

The street in the picture above has small shops and market stalls along both sides. There are also some very small stalls actually on the street, consisting of a small amount of goods on a blanket or small tarp. As we walked by, several of these street 'stall' holders very quickly 'closed' their stalls by picking up the corners of their tarp, rushing to the other side of the road and hanging around with a vigilant expression on their faces (one was the man in the centre of the photo above). We wondered if it was the mafia or the police that were coming. We decided that these stalls must be illegal, because a group of three policemen walked down the street a few minutes later (photo below). Despite waiting another five minutes, we did not see these men return to selling immediately. We may have mentioned once or twice before that there is rubbish everywhere in Egypt. This man is going fishing with a spear gun in the sea at Alexandria. You can see rubbish in the water around him and there were heaps of rubbish on the beaches.

This elegant building shows some Turkish influence on the architecture.