Our Trip To Alexandria

So we made a group trip to Alexandria this weekend. Remember that the weekend here is Friday, so we left on Thursday evening after working with our NGOs and returned Friday evening. It was about a 4-hour bus ride and was completely uneventful, as was pretty much the entirety of our stay in the city. I know we were only there for a day, but I feel like “uneventful” is reasonably characteristic of Alexandria. Many of my colleagues loved it. Before we’d gotten off the bus some of them were asking why we couldn’t stay there longer. It’s cleaner than Cairo and less busy. The ever-present Mediterranean coast is also a pretty big perk. My roommate, Andi, will be studying abroad in Alex (as Egyptians call it), and we discussed how she would be much more comfortable there. But that’s exactly what it is- comfortable. And I find comfortable obscenely boring. I couldn’t tell you about living for a long period of time, because as I mentioned earlier I haven’t encountered any particularly frustrating circumstances in Cairo yet, but I can definitely say I’d rather spend 2 months there than in Alexandria.

The only real redeeming quality I found in the city is its tangible history (though in my biased opinion, Cairo is “The Victorious” in this matter as well). The site seeing was pretty cool, though my camera died early in the day (sorry, parents). We saw the palace of the last monarch of Egypt, which was this absolutely gorgeous piece of land on the beach and is now infested by both tourist and Egyptian beach-goers, with their shoulder-to-shoulder identical commercial umbrellas sprouting on the beach like a dense mushroom garden. Before we left we also got an outside view of the city’s famous citadel, but we unfortunately could not take a look inside because it was Friday. I have a strong feeling that the inside looks like a standard modern-day museum, fully equipped with a gift shop and pretty-looking seashells in glass cases (which I saw when I peaked in). That’s the thing about the place- everything is just too renovated. I suppose I can, or at least need to, get over the fact that a place like that is going to be commercial. And I can’t really think of an alternative solution, but I feel that in Alexandria, much of the antiquity has been lost in the preservation. It’s just too new to be that old.

Before the citadel we saw the Library of Alexandria, and I’m pretty sure that this was the part that many of us Duke nerds were most excited for. I knew that the original library had burned down but I was hoping that I would still find some sense of history and transcendence of time in this revered symbol of academia and scholarship of another era. I think most of my friends were even more disappointed than I was. I heard them talking about how they expected symbolism and meaning and just found themselves in a cool-looking building. I think I still enjoyed it more than I would have a normal library, but only because I could remind myself of the significance of where I was. It’s a very academic place with fantastic archives and some pretty impressive technology, but I wasn’t really there to see what the advancements of today have to offer. I was interested, rather, about how and in what environment the great minds of the time managed to lay the foundations of thought for our age.