Joseph in Egypt: Alex

This week has been full of interesting people and experiences, some sad, some glad, and some just generally ridiculous.
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Let's start with the beginning of the week. Well, the beginning for me, anyway. If I have time, I'll go further. If not, you get Alex till the next installment. My "weekend," as it were, is kind of backwards, as we have church on Friday, and the Saturday is off. So, this Saturday, I went with a friend, Tegan (that's her in the pic, so you know what she looks like. She's squinting cause the sun is bright...), who I met at one of Lindsey's parties a while back, to Alex(andria). Everybody here just calls it Alex, because we're all lazy, so we all know what it means.

Anyway, Alex has been a place I've always wanted to go. Not only was it founded by Alexander the Great, and rumored to house his tomb, but it was also othe home of the famous library, the Pharos lighthouse (my favorite of the seven wonders of the ancient world, I'll have you know), as well as the site of the epic sea battle which cemented the power of the Roman Empire, and lead to the suicide of Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemaic rulers.

After arriving from our 2.5 hour train ride (I write to point five because 2 and a half is so much harder to write...wait...and now I just wasted all that energy explaining it... *angry face* >:-( we decided to hit the catacombs first. Consulting our handy-dandy guidebook, which Tegan was nice enough to bring along. We headed in what we though was the right direction. Which, as it ended up, was, of course, NOT the right direction. But with the help of random Egyptians, who all seemed to know where we

were going without us asking, we somehow found Pompey's Pillar, which was the site of the temple of Serapis (Roman equivalent of Osiris) and the ruins of the daughter library, where they put all the overflow volumes from the ancient library. To give you an idea of why they needed it: It was the law, in ancient Alex, that whenever you came into port, you ship was searched, and any books

were confiscated until they could be copied and returned. The goal was to collect every book in the world. They did a decent job, because at it's peak, the total amount of volumes exceeded that of known works of the time. There must have been some duplicates somewhere. Anyway, the library was underground, in a kinda cave-like-ish room, with cubby-holes on the sides that looked like they could have been used for copying/studying.
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After that, we headed to Antonio Fortress, a medievel fortress built in the 1400s on the foundations of the ancient lighthouse. We tried to hail a taxi, and the first guy we found didn't want to take us. Luckily, there was a very excited taxi driver that volunteered. In fact, he was SO excited that he would stop and shout to everyone he knew, in Arabic of course, HEY I'VE GOT FOREIGNERS IN MY CAR! It was hilarious, and we didn't even really mind when he got a bit lost. Haha.

Arriving at the fort, we tried to find the entrance. Not knowing where or what to expect, we ended up paying to get into a very ghetto Egyptian "aquarium." I guess here that means second-rate dioramas of moth-eaten mounted ocean life interspersed with grossly out of proportion shipwrecks and divers. The only cool part was the HUGE whale skeleton. The great white shark, which looked a little like a cross between my little pony and gumby, was much less impressive.
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From there, we actually found the entrance we wanted, which led up to the walls and the inside of the citadel. The lighting within was extremely surreal. Long halls, flanked by innumerable rooms, were lit by high, slot windows allowing the light to stream in in rays. In the rooms, many of the windows were covered by intricate laticework, which added to the aura of sultan-ness. We walked all the way aroudn the walls, watching the fisherman on teh wave-pounded rocks. They had twenty-foot fishing poles! I wanted to fish with them, but we had a lot of other things we wanted to see.

Made an icecream stop, then headed to a restaurant for lunch. The Arab pizzas we got were HUGE and we couldn't finish everything. (Though I came close.) We then walked down the shoreline, chatting mostly about the church and my mission, which I found a rather random subject of conversation, but really enjoyed answering Tegan's questions. She's had some LDS friends before, and had some things she wanted to know, and it was good for me to be able to remember the experiences I had while I served.

Walked to the modern library at Alexandria, which sits on the site of the ancient library, which was burned by an invading army in the mid-first-century AD. No one is quite sure who to blame for this blight to history, but most agree it was related in some way to the Roman conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt. (Speaking of burning, I somehow managed to burn THROUGH the 50 SPF sunblock I was wearing, though, thankfully, not too seriously! :-) The

modern library itself is a wonder of architecture and style, with wide, open spaces within it's multi-tiered reading levels. It is very quiet, and the sound of chairs scraping periodically is about all that can be heard. Usually you have to have an ID/ticket to get in, but since it was near closing time, the guards let us in for free. It was awesome just wandering around. I want to live there. Haha.

After that, our stay in the marvelous city of Alex was at a close. Made our way to the train station, and ended up having to take a taxi there cause we got lost (although we saw a really awesome statue of Alexander the Great holding a miniature statue of Athena Nike (it looked kinda like Tinkerbell, actually. Maybe he could fly too...) and made the trip home.