Just in TIME: Abby's adventures in the Middle East

post-Thanksgiving update

It's been a while since I've had time to sit down and write something substantial, since we've been moving around quite a lot in the last few weeks, what with our trip south to Luxor and Hurghada and then our Thanksgiving weekend in Alamein and Alexandria. I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving holiday--I know I missed being at home and seeing my family but I had a good day with my new "family" here!
We were actually in Alamein (site of WWII battle) on Thanksgiving day. We drove all day from Cairo, visiting the ancient monastery of St. Bishoi on the way, and ended up being the only group at an otherwise empty resort/hotel right on the Mediterranean. It was so beautiful, partly because we had basically a private beach to ourselves! The sand was so white and the water incredibly turquoise blue and fairly warm. So we had our Thanksgiving dinner there, and the next day we had free to relax and swim. I read a book (I've been doing a lot of that lately, which has been great!) and swam and walked out by myself to a small point, and did a lot of thinking. Then on saturday we visited the El-Alamein war museum, the German and Italian memorials, and the British commonwealth cemetery/memorial. It was powerful to see the gravestones rising out of the barren desert and to imagine young men fighting and dying by the thousands out there. It was overwhelming.
In the late afternoon we reached the city of Alexandria , which was neat because of its location right on the edge of the Mediterranean. Itwas cloudy and cool (well, cooler than Cairo anyway) and not smoggy. but there was not much to see in the city itself in terms of visible history because it has grown so much over the past 2000 years and much of the history is buried underneath the layers of modern urban sprawl. The Greco-Roman catacombs were really neat though, as was the Roman theatre where we all took turns standing in the center of the stage and making fools of ourselves while listening to the loud echo caused by the perfect acoustics of the place. The best part of Alexandria was visiting the new library that has been built near the site of the famous ancient Museum (library) of Alexandria. What a beautiful space! after our tour there we all spent an hour just browsing around. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is designed so that all 10 or so floors are open at once, with two staircases connecting the floors like giant steps, if you can imagine that. Although the new library is nothing like the old one, neither in architecture nor function (the old "Museum" was a place where great scholars and philosophers came together to think and produce scholastic literature, not a public lending library), it was an impressive place.
On Monday we got back to Cairo and had some free time before going out to see the new Harry Potter movie with our Egyptian friends. It was a lot of fun, although it feels like kind of a cop-out to watch a movie instead of taking advantage of being in Cairo. Oh well--that will probably be the first and only movie we see here! But it was fun anyway. The rest of this week we have more classes and this weekend we'll be touring part of the old Islamic Cairo where the great mosques and monuments of the Fatimids and Mamluks stand.

posted by Abby @ 2:51 AM