Alexandria Feb 26th

We are staying in a room at the Pension Acropole, with a bay balcony overlooking the busiest square in downtown Alexandria, with traffic and trams roaring and tooting their way past until very late at night. After all, many of the shops are open until midnight. At one stage I woke in fright because it was quiet! I do recall Keith saying that it was pretty noisy when we looked at the room but I was in love with the view and said we would have it anyway. Considering I was a sleeper who carted her own pillow around and was used to silence, it is amazing how I have adapted to all sorts of sleeping arrangements. Perhaps the secret is having no responsibilities. The only thing we must be concerned about is not outstaying our visas and we haven’t been lying there awake stressing over that.
We have a regular internet café so we checked emails this morning before we set off to find the Alexandria National Museum. Guided by an inadequate free map from a hotel, which we should have been suspicious of since the tomb of the unknown soldier is pictured out in the water, we failed to find it. Instead we met some friendly men who invited us into the garden where they work, in an old people’s home for Italians. They tried to help us and suggested that we might like to visit the nearby cemetery. Of course we did, so we went up Anubis St. (Anubis was the god of mummification and guardian of cemeteries), which is lined with walled cemeteries, each catering to one group or another. We tried to enter one, since the gate was open, but a man came up and explained in Arabic that we were in the wrong cemetery – we gathered this from repeated Arabic with hand signals and when I asked if the one we were in was a Coptic Christian cemetery, he knew those words and pointed to the next cemetery along the street. This turned out to be a cemetery for Christian foreigners, where we found intriguing graves such as those of four young men who all died on the same day, quite a few of servicemen in the 1940’s, one of a young woman which had her number, street and suburb in England given, and numerous family groups and some children. Of course I wanted to know more – what were all these people doing in Alexandria and how had they died? Unfortunately these were plain, business-like headstones with no consideration for historians or curious tourists. After more wandering we decided to give up and we spent the rest of the day in the Alexandria Library. What a place! Today we looked through the Museum of Antiquities then perused the books and indulged in a read; for me Alan Moorhead’s ‘The Blue Nile’ and for Keith, a book on Morocco.

We enjoyed an exhibition about a film maker called Shadi Abdelsalam, who has designed and directed many films and received many international awards. From 1970 on he spent 12 years designing and preparing for a film about Akhenaten, the rebel pharaoh, who decided to worship his own single god, who insisted on art depicting reality rather than a standard face for everyone, and who moved his whole court away for his own safety. The designs were exquisite – beautiful works of art – and so detailed, based on careful research. Sadly, the film was never made due to lack of financial backing. We saw that they have daily screenings of one of Shadi Abdelsalam’s films in a tiny theatrette, so we decided to return tomorrow to watch it. There are art and costume exhibits in the library as well, so we really felt that we had had an afternoon of variety and pleasure.
We strolled home along the corniche as the sun was setting. The colours of Alexandria are apricot, turquoise, deepest blue, charcoal and stone cream.

Alexandria has many beautiful parks.

Keith is reading ‘Learn Arabic’. He didn't get far before he fell asleep.

There are vast numbers of police in Egyptian cities and towns. Many appear to have very little to do and are sitting down much of the time. This officer is paying attention to his mobile phone and shows no interest in chasing crooks or arresting litter bugs. This appears to be a mobile mosque that has been set up in a busy street.

The man on the left has a small table on which he has several mobile phones. You pay him to make a call with one of his phones.

All over Egypt most vehicles drive at night with no lights turned on. Some use their parking lights. Some flash their lights as a warning to other vehicles or pedestrians.