Ah, Alexandria!

Imagine a place where you can take an Uber 130 miles for $40! 

Thus Cairo to Alexandria.

And what a ride it was! Egyptian infrastructure is -- oh, shall we be kind and say iffy? You don't cross a road expecting to get to the other side here. You cross it hoping to survive the journey. There are no traffic lights; you just step out into the constant stream of honking horns and hope for the best. And drivers do not stop for pedestrians, they honk at them. The honking NEVER stops. Yet the only accident we've seen was a truck carrying tomatoes that overturned on the highway to Alexandria. It was a beautiful mess.

There was a subway in Cairo, apparently, but I have no idea where it was located or where it goes. The light rail is for wealthy people to go to their houses on the outskirts. The buses are all unmarked white vans that people kind of hitchhike to catch. The sidewalks in Cairo were so torn up -- a broken hip waiting to happen -- that everyone just walked in the street. Here in Alexandria, sidewalks are somewhat wider, but the streets are no less fraught and the honking no less constant. And of course there is the howl of the muezzin every hour or two. It's loud.

Anyway, Alexandria! Our apartment isn't great, but it's good enough, and it has a balcony and a washing machine and a very nice shower. After we settled in, we went out to admire the ancient ruins of Roman baths, which included a theater and lecture halls. There were many, many stray cats.

We ate in a very nice rooftop restaurant at a swanky hotel with a view of the harbor, though it was dark so we couldn't really see it. Alexandria is known for its seafood; we had some lovely giant prawns there. 

There's a lot of underwater archaeology going on apparently, as part of Alexandria sank beneath the sea taking all of its treasures with it. As workers bring the artifacts up, statue by statue, they are displayed in the city's museums. 

After a ten-hour sleep, we headed out to the catacombs, which are second-century A.D. Greco-Egyptian. Though the ancient Egyptians didn't want to hang out with the bodies of their loved ones, the Greek Egyptians did.

The catacombs included a feasting room where they held dinners after the burials. 

There were many gorgeous wall paintings that had survived, and many, many stray dogs that hung around hoping to be petted. 

From there we Ubered to the library of Alexandria, built on the site of the great library that was destroyed partly by Julius Caesar, partly by an Arab conquest in the seventh century, and partly by a process of neglect, annihilating millions of priceless volumes. 

The new library is gorgeous, designed by a Norwegian, full of antiquities and books and people doing research, and with a children's library that is accessible only to actual children (their moms wait outside), and by me because I am a children's book writer. Oh, the perks of fame! 

Between the ancient manuscripts and the ancient artifacts, we were really quite awed.

We walked along the harbor promenade in the sun as locals fished. It was very nice, not least because we didn't have to cross any streets. And our route led us to Drinkies, a chain that is the only place one can buy beer in Egypt. So we did.

Sadly, we were able to access CNN here, and we heard all the terrible news from the last couple of days. Horrifying. There is nothing else I can say.

We ate at an unusual seafood restaurant where the only fish Phil and I could order was one that "only eats shrimp, doesn't move much, and has a gold nose." There were peculiar cocktails -- mine had both tequila and gin. Yikes. With a lot of investigation we discovered the fish was red mullet. It was delicious. Phil also had liver the Alexandrian way and we ate some fried calamari. We walked back along the pedestrian walkway (thank god) and arrived in time to 
collapse in exhaustion.