Alexandria!

My first trip to the Mediterranean Sea!! It certainly is a site to see and you should all see it sometime if you haven't already. We left early Friday morning to take the vans up to Alexandria, the second largest city in Egypt (behind Cairo, of course). This place is unbelievable, and if I come back to Egypt I think I will come here. When we got there, we found a place to stay. This was interesting...the hotels were wayyy to expensive, so we found this little hole in the wall motel place that had amazing views of the Sea. Granted, it was old and run down, but you wouldn't believe that it only cost 15 POUNDS A NIGHT!! That's 3 American dollars. Are you kidding me?? I could come here for a week and have a blast and probably spend about 100 bucks. Unbelievable.

After we got everything squared away, we visited the Qaitbay an old fort built by Sultan Qaitbay in the 15th century. This was an important fort, given its protected location with the Sea guarding the rest of the city. This was also the cite of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria, which was one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. It was crucial to navigation and trading at the time, built in the 3rd Century. It is obviously not in existence anymore. The fort was an incredible structure though. A building that seemingly went on forever, there were three or four floors of the main building with great views looking out into the Sea, and was surrounded by a large outer wall.

After this, we visited the Catacombs, an area of underground tombs from the Pharaonic Era. The engineering was unbelievable here, spiral staircase running deep underground into a huge cave with a number of tombs in it. The walls had carvings on them, but these were a little different because the carvings came out of the wall, meaning they must have carved them underground out of the already existing rock. Amazing. To add a little humor to the story, apparently this area was found when a donkey fell through a hole and into the cave...not sure how true that is though, haha.

Later in the day we took a tour of the recently renovated Alexandria Library....a huuuge library that cost $220 to make! It's in the same location as the ancient library that was so influential to civilization during the Greek and Roman era, containing thousands of scrolls and manuscrips and was the center point of the educational world at the time (this was way back in the 1st century, I believe). This was burned down though by Julius Cesar during the Alexandrian wars though, and wasn't rebuilt until recently. It was really cool, 7 stories tall, a capacity for millions of books (literaly) and digital archives with practically unlimited storage (I think somewhere along the lines of 1.5 E 15 bits, if you even know what those mean, haha)

After this we had dinner at a great restaraunt and then went back and hung out around our hotel (if you can call it a hotel). The next day we spent the whole morning at the beach! Nice and relaxing...got to swim in the Mediterranean, even though it was a little murky. After we headed back to Cairo. Really wanted to stay there longer, but it was awesome to have a couple days off anyway!