Alexandria

Alexandria. The Jewel of the Nile. The Gateway to Egypt. The site of a world wonder and history's most famous library. Kate and I have a special soft spot for the city as we've been working (albeit extremely slowly, painstakingly, laboriously, etc etc on our Alexandria screenplay, an oeuvre, quite like the great cathedrals of the middle ages, that has taken us far longer than we had ever imagined to complete. Our hope was that Alexandria the city would help inspire us.

And so it was that we set out on an overnight bus trek (£95) from Dahab to Sharm to Alexandria, braving a terrible Egyptian film for our triumphant return to Lower Egypt, arriving at the tip of the Delta around 6am, negotiating a cab, and getting dropped within a block of our pre-booked and ultra cheap hotel, the Normandy. At 40£ a night (about 8 dollars), we weren't expecting much, but this place didn't even live up to that. True, the room was beautiful - a once-grand Art Deco inspired corner unit with a big bed, desk, sitting area, and balcony directly overlooking the Mediterranean... but the bed was a paper thin mattress on top of saggy, shrieking springs, the walls were smeared with something brown whose origins I'd rather not speculate upon, and the floor hadn't been swept since the linen was changed, which I would place a conservative wager on being around twenty five years ago. Still, when you're tired, a bed is a bed is a bed and we slept quite soundly for a few hours before going to look for a new place.

...settling upon the Hotel Acropole, which was literally across the street. £60/night, but it included breakfast and wasn't disgustingly filthy. We were upgraded to a seaview room, but Kate didn't like it as much so we stayed with our original choice, which was probably better in the end. Plus, we still got to walk by this sign on the way up the stairs every day.

Now Alexandria is described as having little to show of it's storied ancient heritage, but we didn't find that to be the case at all. It's maybe no Rome, but there are a ton of ancient sites and sights scattered through the city that help give you a little idea of what Ptolemaic Egypt might have been like. As we were there researching our script, we made sure to make it to as many of them as possible, especially as there is surprisingly little information available in books about Ptolemaic Egypt. We started off our ancient Alexandria treasure hunt very appropriately with a visit to Kom El-Dikka, which houses the Roman amphitheater, houses, baths, and, interestingly, library lecture rooms - the only real remnants of the famous antique library.

The amphitheater itself boasts assigned seating, early Christian graffiti, and perfect acoustics if you stand on a certain stone. You can really feel the amplification. The rest of the site was also quite good - the lecture rooms were invaluable research for us and wandering through the houses was a little like stepping back in time, plus the Villa of the Birds has some exquisite mosaics. The only problem is that you aren't allowed to view the baths as the area is supposedly unsafe, though you are allowed to be pestered and followed around by annoying guards seeking baksheesh. Still, it's definitely worth a wander.

We also hoofed it out to the Antoniadis Gardens, realizing along the way that the tourist information office in Alexandria knows absolutely nothing about the city. They told us that a temple we wanted to see used to be in one area but was then moved (?) to another one that you absolutely needed a taxi to get to. On our walk, we found the temple in a third, unmentioned site about a ten minute walk away. The gardens, however, were not so close, but they did take us by the absolute best £1 falafel in the world. Man, this place was delicious. And it actually brings up another point I should talk about - pricing. Basically, we were thinking that Alexandria might be a bit pricier than Dahab as it's a big city and not a backpacker destination. But we should have taken into account the fact that it's also not overrun with tourists. As such, prices were much better than elsewhere in Egypt. £1 falafel was standard throughout the city and because that's just so ludicrously cheap (about 20 cents), it was almost all we ate, especially as the ubiquitous fast-food chain Gad had a stand on pretty much every corner. When we'd had a little too many falafels in a row, however, we'd go to Mohammed Ahmed's, a little fuul joint with a ton of variation in their prices (different prices every time we went for some reason), but never did we spend more than £20 on a meal for 2. We did do one big splurge fish meal as the seafood in the city is legendary... but the atmosphere left something to be desired when a big party moved into basically all the tables surrounding our own and shouted over us in conversation like we weren't there.

Anyway, the gardens were pretty and well worth the £2 entry fee to get into the fancy part where the lawns are better kept up and its not absolutely swarmed by Alexandrian families. We spent a couple relaxing hours there until we were kicked out and went to the nearby mall to catch a flick - Eagle Eye, one that we found surprisingly entertaining. Actually, we would end up watching quite a few movies while in Alexandria, which fit in well with the whole writing a movie thing. We also saw: The Day the Earth Stood Still (not so good), The Bank Job (pretty good), and Australia (ambitious, but ultimately a failure). One interesting note about watching Western films in Egyptian cinemas - they cut out any nudity and/or passionate kissing...

The place we spent the most time, however, was at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, or the new Library of Alexandria. The place is massive and claims to have the largest collection of books outside the Library of Congress. Perhaps, but the English sections, while excellent for a foreign library, can't compare with the system at UCLA. Still, we went several times, both to see the Graeco-Roman antiquities hosted there as well as to use the library for research and a quite place to write. There are a couple pretty weird things about it, however, weird because it's supposed to be first and foremost a research institution. Number one: you can't take in any bags whatsoever. You're allowed to take in all the notebooks, pens, books, etc that you need, but you absolutely can't carry them in a bag even though you still have to put all that stuff through an x-ray machine and you have to walk through a metal detector. Unless the guard decides he doesn't care as many people inside did have bags all the same, though we were repeatedly denied access. Number two: the computers are about 15 years old, really slow, and crippled by the library's custom operating system that restricts access to certain internet sites and also doesn't allow you to open up more than one window. Not just in your browser, but period. So you can't, for example, be looking up ancient Alexandria online and also searching the library's collection at the same time. Not very research friendly.

Other wanderings including a trip to the Qaitbay Citadel, established by Sultan Qaitbay in 1477 on the site of the famous Pharos - the Lighthouse which was one of the Wonders of the Ancient World. The citadel was built using some stones from the Lighthouse (which fell in an earthquake) but I can't say it was all the impressive of a tourist site, especially as it was just swarmed with (mostly really rude) people yelling, pushing, and generally making things unpleasant for the rest of us. Though a group of giggling girls did come up and ask to shake my hand and then asked for an autograph. But when you're me, you kind of expect that sort of thing. We did get some street fuul and some of the famous Alexandrian ice cream at Azaa, which is like stretchy soft-serve and really wasn't to our liking.

We tried to plan our sightseeing to a certain extent around what we were working on scriptwise, so it wasn't until we'd been there for a while that we finally started going to the city's catacombs. The El-Anfushi tombs date back to about 250BC and are quite interesting to walk around, filled with sort of shelves for family member's bodies and interesting painted scenes. The El-Shatby tombs are considered the city's oldest but were really not worth the entry fee - you could only peek in from the outside and everything was horribly flooded and poorly maintained. The Kom-el-Shuqqafa Roman catacombs are the most famous - and rightly so. Unfortunately, no pictures of these treasures. You enter the main tomb complex by walking down a spiral staircase surrounding a central shaft used to lower the bodies down. A few stories into the earth and you come out in the main hall, which splits in a few directions, one of which leads to the dining room where friends and family of the deceased would come to have funeral or remembrance banquets. The tombs were absolutely stunning and a real interesting mix of Roman, Greek, and Egyptian motifs, quite large and rambling as well. Again, the bottom levels were flooded, but here that still left us a couple of the top levels to explore.

Last on the list of ancient sites is perhaps the most well-known one in Alexandria - Pompey's Pillar, which is a horrible misnomer. Pompey never even set foot in Alexandria - he got close but was then beheaded. The actual history behind this pillar, for anyone who is interested, is that it was erected by the Roman emperor Diocletian (of Split palace fame) in the 3rd century as part of a new facade of the Serapeum, a temple to the Graeco-Egyptian god Serapis created by Ptolemy, Alexander's general and successor in Alexandria, to appeal to both the native Egyptians and the Greek colonists in his empire. The pillar is, by the way, massive, truly enormous. You don't really get the whole sense of the scale from the picture, but they say a party of 25 could picnic on its top.

As you might have guessed, the remains of the Serapeum - which was once supposedly the second most beautiful building in the world behind the Capitol in Rome - is also on the site, but it's ruins are less then impressive. Mostly just rubble and foundations, but there are also some underground rooms and tunnels that are surprisingly well preserved. These were really interesting to us as they once acted as a bit of a spill-over library for the main Great Library. It was a bit of a surprise, actually, as this stuff isn't advertised in the guidebooks - we'd only heard that there are some unimpressive ruins and a big pillar - but I would highly recommend it for anyone interested in antiquity.

Sadly, it was time to say goodbye to Alexandria as we'd booked a flight to London. But that trip technically began the night before when we hailed a cab to the mosquito filled bus station before throwing some elbows to get our bags on the bus only to find out that we'd scored the worst seats on the bus - the ones behind the bulkhead that have no leg room due to a filthy tray table blocking our way. Things only got worse when the bus attendant spilled old tea and chewed seeds all over Kate about 2 hours into the journey. He then forced us to accept a bottle of water as an apology... only to try to charge us later for it, of course. We did, however, eventually get back to Sharm el-Sheikh (where the flight was from) and managed to haggle our taxi driver down to a not-totally-ripping-us-off price into town only to find that all the internet places charged totally-ripping-us-off prices (20 pounds an hour, when we'd been paying 2 in Alexandria). So we stayed at Cilantro, Egypt's answer to Starbucks, for pretty much the whole day, getting some sandwiches, drinks, and free wifi on our cracked screen laptop that we would finally fix in London...