اسكندرية

The train ride from Cairo to Alexandria is just over two hours. The route is along the western edge of the Nile delta, so there are a lot of crops and irrigation which attract birds. The most common species is the Cattle Egret but there are also Night-herons, Hoopoes, lapwings, White-breasted and Pied Kingfishers, and falcons.

As soon as I reached Alexandria’s shoreline from the train station I was stunned by the view. Huge blue waves crashing on the rocks right next to the corniche’s sidewalk. There were a lot of couples holding hands and watching the sunset. The amount of public affection in Egypt was remarkable to me since it is another thing I do not see a lot of in Jordan. Seeing married and unmarried conservative couples cuddling and laying in each others laps in the park was charming and surprising. I say they were conservative because many of the women wore the niqab. 

The first morning in Alexandria I sat on the corniche wall in the heavy fog. I was approached by a twenty-something Egyptian guy that asked me if he could sit next to me and talk. Up until that point most of my interaction with Egyptian men of this age was uni-directional and consisted of name-calling and hissing sounds. So, I told him he could sit and talk. We later got up to walk down the corniche and he asked me if I was from Syria.

“Yeah, from Syria. But I live in Jordan.”

“I had a Syrian girlfriend once. She’s in Saudi now. I did this when she left me.” He pushes up his left jacket sleeve to show me a large burn on his wrist. 

“Why’d you do that?” 

“I just loved her so much.”

“That’s...nice.”

I stop to take a picture of a wrecked fishing boat in the fog when a man with a bruise on his forehead (see below) approaches us and starts asking me in English why I am photographing that. I respond in Arabic and ask him if photography is prohibited there for some reason.

“Why you take photo?!”

My new friend clarifies for him that I do not speak English, but the stranger keeps up his questioning in English.

“Why you take photo of ugly thing? You’re from where!?”

“Jordan.”

Only then does he start speaking Arabic.

“OK, why are you photographing this? This is ugly, why can’t you photograph something beautiful?”

“Actually, this is a hundred times prettier than anything in Jordan.”

This goes on for a while but I finally agree to not photograph it anymore. My friend looks just as surprised as me since the man seemed genuinely angry.

Here is a good example of the forehead bruise I was referring to: زبيبة الصلاة. Ostensibly, it is a sign that someone prays on a regular basis and the repeated head-to-floor contact results in the mark. The problem is that it is very obviously intentional (either dyed with henna or due to purposeful pressure on that point). I find it distasteful to say the least and the only thing it advertises is how self-righteous and vain those who have it are. Some people tell me that this mark is genuinely a product of regular prayer on the hard floors of the mosque, but that would not explain why it is only sported by Egyptian assholes. If anyone knows of other countries that have a significant number of “prayer raisins,” as they are called, please let me know so I can edit that to just say “assholes.” In any case, they are beneficial to me because it is a clear signal to limit interaction and to lie about my nationality.

The souqs near the western side of Alexandria are full of every kind of fruit, vegetable, and meat, but the main feature is the freshly caught fish and shrimp. To get the best meal, you pick out whatever seafood you want, put it in a bag, and bring it to a restaurant to cook for you-- fried or grilled. I ate fish this way everyday in Alexandria and it was always delicious. The restaurant I went to, which was really a family kitchen with one table open for the public, cooked our hand-picked fish and shrimp to perfection and also prepared garlic mashed potatoes, baba ghanoush, and soups for us, all for a few dollars.

Most of my time in Alexandria was spent walking along the corniche and watching the fishermen and passersby. At the far end of the corniche is the Citadel of Qaitbay, built in 1477.

For the five days I was in Alexandria, there was a power outage for an hour or two every night at 8pm. It seemed to be scheduled but I was told that they were a result of the overused power grid. After the revolution, construction and development became unregulated. Buildings that were once two stories became five and all the occupants were now suddenly sharing the same limited electricity. 

Like Amman and Cairo, Alexandria has neighborhoods with lots of book stands. They sell every kind of book imaginable--Arabic and English romance novels, historical texts, kids books. Alongside Ray Bradbury, Danielle Steele, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are copies of the Protocols of Zion, the one book that seems to be found at every book stand in the Arab world. I was approached by a woman named Sara and her young daughter. Sara was curious how I learned Arabic and recommended some other books to me. We exchanged contact info and decided to meet up again. Interactions like that seemed pretty frequent in Egypt and, again compared to Jordan, it was a refreshing change. 

Getting around Alexandria is really simple. It is close to impossible to get lost since the whole city is arranged along the Mediterranean, so most destinations are just east or west. A cab ride across the city could cost a few US dollars, but if one uses a mashrou’, or a minibus, then the trip is well under a dollar. Of course this means being piled into a small van with ten other passengers, but that itself can be an adventure and a good opportunity to meet new people and practice Arabic.

I was lucky to visit Alexandria University’s TAFL center while I was there. It is the former center for Flagship’s capstone year, the place I would have likely been studying this here if the program had not relocated to Morocco. I met some of the professors and the director. The student population is now almost exclusively Chinese and European. It was definitely sad to see, in both Cairo and Alexandria, all of the opportunities that current Arabic students have lost.

Harassment was strangely increased while walking around with a female professor. Although she is Egyptian and wears the hijab, the men in the street seemed to think that she was an American because she was walking with two Americans. They made comments about how “She looks like she could be Egyptian!” and called her different names. It was bizarre. Possibly the combination of an Egyptian-looking American Muslim woman was just too much for them to handle.

I went to the Alexandria Museum the next day. Of course, the famous one was destroyed between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD, but there is a new one that still holds some of the old documents. It is a stunning building inside and out where local students will gather and study, taking advantage of the massive amounts of books in a number of languages. There is also a museum downstairs.

I was truly sad to leave Alexandria and all the people I met there, but I was looking forward to one more day in Cairo because I still had a lot left to see.