Part 4 - Alexandria

After we had stayed in Dubai for a while, myself & Robin flew to Alexandria, Egypt. This is Saudi Arabia out of the window of the plane. It was absolutely beautiful and this is probably the closest I'll ever get to it, seeing as how they don't exactly let just anyone in.

Egypt was very different from the Sandbox, even though they're located so close to each other. At one point on the ride home from the airport Robin & I looked at each other and at the same time said 'I think that couple was holding hands' and then we started looking around and realized that every couple was holding hands!! In the Sandbox there is NO touching between men & women. We even kind of make fun of the couples who go to parks and sit as close to each other as they possibly can without touching at all. It was strange to be in an Arab country where women were covered but the people were still so touchie...we even saw a couple kissing! We were also terribly harrassed in Egypt. You would think that they have lots of tourists there and are used to seeing white girls. Well it was even worse than it is in the Sandbox, especially b/c of the touching. Here in the Sandbox they can yell at you all they want but no man would dare to touch you, even barely brush by you, in the street. Egyptian guys will just follow you around saying whatever they want and getting as close as they want. They were so obnoxiously persistent that we finally just started to not speak English or Arabic. We wouldn't say anything to anyone until they guessed a nationality and then we just agreed and maybe said a few words in another language. It was an interesting tactic that seemed to work pretty well. At one point we had a group of guys walk past us and we heard them discussing (in Arabic) what they were going to say to us. Finally the leader turns around and says 'welcome to Egypt'. Seriously? 5 minutes and that's the best they could come up with?!?

We stayed in Alex just 2 nights but had lots of fun. We actually ordered Chinese food, which is quite different for us. In the Sandbox we have 1 chinese restaurant that isn't even that good and they certainly don't deliver...they don't even take orders over the phone and then let you pick it up later. So when we ordered in Alex and someone showed up on our doorstep in about 15 minutes we were amazed. Plus we got a 12 % discount for having it delivered. Egypt is weird and every restaurant delivers, even McDonalds, and every restuarant gives you a discount for having it delivered. However, every meal that we ate out, we ate at a restaurant overlooking the Med.

Here's the Mediterranean but it was cold and there weren't really any beaches. We did go to this beautiful fort that was set out away from the city and kind of just in the middle of the water, but then it cost to go in, so we admired it from the outside.

Here we are at some Roman Ruins. We didn't use a tour guide or anything like that, just lonely planet and the advice of some friends but our taxi driver was this really cute old man with a handlebar moustache and he kept volunteering to wait for us and take us to the next place, so we kept having him wait. Once we'd been to one or two tourist sites he figured out what we were looking for and then was so proud to drive us around and point out the sites and give us some history but he was speaking in Egyptian Arabic which is a little different than the Arabic that we are learning and plus he was talking really fast so we didn't actually have a clue what he was saying.

We ended our day in this huge garden, it's actually the Presiden't summer home but they open it up for tourists during the winter while he's not around. It was just beautiful, right on the water. Of course, we stayed for the sunset which was just amazing, then walked back to the road, absolutely freezing. We had a taxi driver follow us around for over 2 hours constantly asking if we needed a ride and we kept telling him no, but he just wouldn't leave us alone. After 2 hours of waiting for us, we left the park and went to eat dinner at chili's across the street...we weren't lying when we told him we didn't need a taxi. He was actually really mad but that was his own fault.

There was a lot more that we could have done in Alex, but the point of our vacation was to rest and to do whatever we wanted and that's exactly what we did. There was no schedule and we had a blast!

Funny story. When we met up with some friends in Cairo, they told us that their favorite place in Alex was the aquarium. Apparently when they visited there were absolutely no live fish and no water. They just had all these fish tanks with the backs painted blue and then plastic fish hanging from the tops by fishing line and everyone was just walking around like that was what an aquarium was supposed to be. Too bad we didn't know about it or I would have gone to see it.