Alexandria to Cairo

The Alexandria National Museum

This museum was outside the detailed map provided in my Rough Guide, which described it as being in an "Italianate mansion." Unfortunately for me, the neighborhood had plenty of these, so I accidentally visited an IT company and a private residence before I came to the right place. Next time I'll actually pay attention to the street numbers that the book had helpfully provided.

The National Museum, particularly the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Rroman exhibitions, was a real pleasure to visit. I'm a big fan of New Kingdom art, which ranges from stark realism (most people will be familiar with the bust of Nefertiti) to caricature that appears almost modern. This head of Akhenaten, the pharaoh to whom Nefertiti was married, is a good example of the latter. I'm now that much more excited to go to the Egyptian National Museum.

The rest of the collection is Coptic and Islamic artifacts. The top floor contains a room of "treasures" which King Farouk was forced to abandon following Nasser's 1952 coup. Unless you're interested in 20th century French porcelain or English china, I'd give this room a miss.

Alexandria Library

The Bibliotheca Alexandria was conceived as a "rebirth" of the Ancient Library of Alexandria, which housed original manuscripts of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. The Austrian-Norwegian team who won the commission reflected this rebirth by designing a library in the shape of a giant discus, representing a new sun rising over the city. If there's anything I remember from my years as an architecture school flunky, it's that taking too literal an approach to a concept is a bad idea. If you're building a train station, you should resist any urge to design a building in the shape of a train. The Bibliotheca Alexandria isn't shaped like a book, but the whole "rising sun" motif is a little heavy-handed for my taste.

The library also has letters, pictographs and hieroglyphs from every alphabet carved on the stone facing of the south wall, representing the breadth of knowledge the library contains. Again, a little gimmicky, but I still found myself obsessively counting how many of the symbols I could recognize as I loitered near the reflecting pool beneath the wall. The public spaces around the library are very active and the project appears to whole thing looks like it's been very successful at serving Alexandrians. I wish I had planned ahead and attended some of the events that are scheduled every day. On a weekend trip to Ljubljana last year, Ms. Chadha arranged tickets to a modern dance performance. I've tried ever since to incorporate that kind of thing into my traveling. I'm just not as good a planner as Ms. C.

I walked back along the corniche to my hotel room, bought a bottle of wine, and read on the balcony for the rest of the night. I'm already scheming how I'll get back to Alexandria soon.

Back to Cairo

My train wasn't leaving for an hour, so I went for a walk in the neighborhood just to the south of Alexandria's Masr Station. The streets were really bustling for 9:00 on a Sunday morning, which I suppose is more equivalent to Monday morning, so perhaps really not that interesting of an observation. At a juice stand, I watched the owner feed eighteen-inch lengths of sugarcane into a wheel press, collecting the resulting milky-green liquid in a tin bucket.

I had no idea what this stuff was called, but I was able to realize a long held fantasy by going up to the bar and asking for one "sugar juice," which I hoped would get the meaning across.* It did, and he served up two mug-fulls; one for me, and another so that he could demonstrate the safety and quality of his juice by drinking some himself. He took a quick pull on it, spitting a fair bit back into his mug, and then emptied the mug's contents back into the common pot. He had just given birth to exactly the concerns he hoped to dispel. I wasn't worried though, because what kind of bacteria could possibly survive in a warm brew of pure sugar water?

I took a deep pull of the juice. I had expected something really powerful, because I'd seen a travel program once where the host was absolutely destroyed by the sweetness of a similar drink. Maybe it's testament to my self-induced hyperglycemia that I wasn't fazed in the least - just one more thing to thank the folks at Coca Cola for. Fresh juice stands are one of my favorite things in the world, my only complaint is that because the juice is served in actual glasses or mugs, you're tethered to the stand and have to drink up on the spot. Sure, there's conversation sometimes, but more often than not, people just want to do their job without being bothered. I did ask the juice-guy whether next time I could have mine "bisukr," or "with sugar," which is how I normally order my tea. He acted like it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard, though he must have heard variations of the same joke every day for the last twenty years.

*I've since learned that this sugarcane juice is called "3aseer asab," which might mean "cane juice."