As I said in my last post, there have been some images of Alexandria that I have seen in the past few days that I hope will give you an idea of life in this city. I don't usually take my camera out with me, so I will have to rely on my descriptions to illustrate the scenes.
Lunch at the "Mohamed Ahmed" restaurant
We went to eat at a restaurant called Mohamed Ahmed which specializes in Ful (a dish made from fava beans) and falafel. It was absolutely delicious. My lasting image of the restaurant is a large pile of falafel and pita in the middle of the table that all of us proceeded to dig into with pleasure. I'm not sure what kind of reputation Egyptian cuisine has internationally, but I have found it so far to be quite good. I generally like bread in all shapes and sizes, and so I have been voraciously devouring pita from day one here. Falafel is quite good too, and I had a delicious grilled and stuffed cauliflower last night (karnabeet in Arabic) that I will definitely be on the lookout for again.
The bouncing train
During our orientation we visited a place called Muntaza. It was located right next to the Mediterranean, and we spent a very nice afternoon in a park about a quarter mile from the shore. To get there we took the local train (probably the equivalent of commuter rail as opposed to the tram in Alexandria). The train was very emblematic of Alexandria's feel on the whole: it left on time and got us from point A to point B, but it wasn't necessarily in the greatest condition and the doors didn't close. But, as I thought to myself on the train, the fact that the doors didn't close didn't really mean anything as far as our being able to get where we needed to go. The funniest part of the ride was when we hit a bouncy stretch of track (I don't know how a train track can be bouncy, but this one certainly was) and some young boys in the car ahead of us started jumping up and down as if they were on a trampoleen. Quite a funny sight.
Walking down the alley
As I mentioned yesterday, I went on a meandering walk through Alexandria as I was walking from the girls' dorms back to the boys' dorms (they are about 15 minutes from each other by car, 40 minutes walking). I happened to walk down a narrow alley just to see what was there. There were tall apartment buildings on both sides (there are almost no one or two story buildings in the part of Alexandria that we're in), and the narrowness of the alley made the buildings seem even taller. It gives you the feeling of walking through a narrow, deep canyon. At any given moment, dozens of people are looking out their windows or sitting on their porches looking down at the street. The streets never feel deserted. I happened to look up at one point and I saw a woman in a full hijab (nothing showing but her eyes) peering over her balcony and slowly lowering a basket to ground level from her tenth floor perch. I'm not sure what she wanted put in that bucket, but it remained about 10 feet above street level while she rested her arm on the balcony ledge and looked down at the street. From my perspective, with my head tilted all the way back to see high enough and with the tall buildings on both sides of the streets framing her, the woman cut a striking yet absolutely mysterious figure. My trip down the alley ended with my realizing that I had gone the wrong way, but after I asked a man working on his car in the alley for directions back to my dorm, he asked me to sit down for tea before I headed on my way. We had a nice chat (albeit in my somewhat basic Arabic) and, after meeting and talking with a few kids who had been milling around us, I walked back to the dorm just as the evening call to prayer sounded.
I'm sure that there will be many more stories and images like these, and I will try to write about them throughout the semester. For tonight, I have to finish a little homework for my "Media Arabic" class and then some of the Egyptians and some of my friends on the program are going to head to a coffee shop to chat and play backgammon (my new favorite game). إلى لقاء
No comments:
Post a Comment