14th April El Alamein

 

El Alamein is about 55 km to the west of the hotel so after breakfast we organised with the hotel for a driver to pick us up and go see the cemeteries and museum. He duly arrived at 10 am and drove west.

Cemeteries

We visited 3 of the four memorials in the time we had available, each reflected the different styles of the countries. The Allied memorial was a traditional western cemetery with a separate section for Australia.

		Allied Memorial VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

From here we drove to the German memorial. The names were alphabetical with a coffin for each town where soldiers had come from. There was one un-named coffin for the French that supported them. There was a museum upstairs with details of other war memorials.

The Italian memorial was a little further down the road. It included a museum as well, all the labels were in Italian.

		Italian memorial VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Museum

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/alemeinmuseum.htm gives some basic information about the museum. What they didn’t tell you was that during the 1992 refit they retiled outside with the Cairo pavement – how exciting.

		El Alamein Museum VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

13th April Ice Cold in Alex

 

Not quite ice cold but definitely cooler than Cairo! Geoff’s school follow the Coptic calendar for Easter so he only gets a week for Easter compared with my 2 weeks. We had decided to travel and see another part of Egypt and Thomas cook were offering 3 nights at the Borg el Arab hotel as one of the Easter special deals, with so many Star Trek fans in the family we couldn’t resist!

The road from Cairo to Alexandria is 250 km long and varies between 4 lanes of visible tarmac to two lanes with speed bumps and sand.As far as I could tell there is still construction work being done as the speed bumps and change in lane size and road quality occurs when we were swapping from 2 to 4 lanes. At these point enterprising Egyptians had set up stalls to sell drinks and crisps to the motorists as they passed by, some even had what I assumed to be large wooden sticks for herding camels. We choose to travel by taxi as apposed to train or even flying. The train is 50 LE (£5) per person to get there but then there is the added hassle of a taxi at either end and while we have trustworthy and reliable taxi drivers here in Cairo we were not too certain about the quality of them in Alex. A taxi cost us 500 Le (£50) door to door and was well worth the cost as Ahmed, our driver, took us into Alex to see some of the sights before leaving us at the hotel.

Alexandria National Museum

We were actually hoping to go to Graeco Roman museum but locals directed us here, which is just as well as the tourist policeman informed us the Roman museum was shut for renovation. When we checked later in our Lonely Planet travel book for Egypt printed in May 2010 the entry read:

“there is no official completion date for this work, and the museum may be shuttered for the foreseeable future”

How right they were!  The National Museum was well worth a look, it was well laid out, exhibits had labels in English and the quality of the exhibits was excellent. As with many museums you were not allowed to take pictures inside but I did snap Maddy and Geoff on the way out before we moved on.   

Fort Qaitby

The Fort was built in the 1480's by Sultan Qaitbey, on the site of Alexandria's ancient lighthouse. Parts of the remains of the lighthouse can be seen in the construction of the old fort. It looks like your classic sandcastle! The Castle was great to walk round with some stunning view of Alexandria.

 

The building in the centre across the harbour in picture 6 is the library in Alexandria! It was sad to find that for a city with such a rich history very little had been preserved.

Dead Fish / Live Fish

Just next to the fort was a museum of dead fish and a hydro biological museum that claimed to contain many rare fish – not true but at 5Le (50p) we took a look. The dead fish were interesting but the live fish were not as well kept at you might want. Certainly not the quite of London zoo, or the signs telling you not to tap the glass or use your flash . . . .

From here we went to McDonalds before heading west to the hotel as it lay 52km to the west of Alexandria. We took the scenic route looking for the village of Borg El Arab (spelt on the road signs Porg el Arab), but eventually we got the idea we were nowhere near the sea and headed to the coast and the Matruh Dessert Road that links Alexandria with Libya. From here it was easy, the hotel was well sign posted and we made it with no further ado. Two rooms were ready for us a double and a twin, we had hoped Maddison’s friend Louisa would have made it but her parents went to Suknah so Maddy had the room all to herself. There was no wi-fi available so Geoff and Maddy had to make do with the gams they had on their laptops and I read (kindles are ace) some Martin Lloyd-Jones. We did bring some DVD’s with us, as seasoned travellers you work out the tv isn’t always what you expect! However, they carried BBC world news, MBC action, Dubai 1 and some of the other channels we watch in Cairo so the first evening went quite quickly. Geoff and I went for a bit of a wander around the resort looking for shops and found a small shopping precinct for people staying in the surrounding apartments (the KFC was shut down though so we did without dinner as McDonalds had been quite late).  

,    Imagine my amazement at finding the Cairo tessellation here!

31st March Carnival!

 

For the fist time in 2 years the school held it’s annual carnival. Each member of staff had a job at a specific outlet, the maths department had the privilege of running the pony and camel ride. Big smiles all round. Rides were purchased using the ticket based system that is so common here in Egypt. You take your money buy tickets and then exchange these tickets for rides, food, the hena lady . . . We all did 1 hour of taking tickets from 12 until 5pm and could leave after our shift was over, Maddy and I left about 2pm after getting hena tattoos on our legs. We called a taxi that turned up at 2:50pm and were home within 30 mins where Geoff, who had stayed at home, made us fried egg sandwiches for lunch.

Baby donkey and Maddy with Louisa on a camel

Nour and her ‘supportive friends’

23rd March Honoured Guests

 

Yesterday one of the two maths matrons Shehira invited Amira, Maddy and me to the signing of her wedding contract! Muslim weddings are completely different to UK weddings. Today was the signing of the wedding contract but it will be another 2 weeks before they move in together.

Our first adventure was getting there (and I’m still not sure where there was). Tara, the other maths matron, came and collected us and took us to the metro. Now you need to understand that Tara speaks as much English as I do Arabic so when she called to say she was on her way I phoned Amira to get her to phone Tara to get a translation and then call me back to tell me what she had said! We managed the metro and a change at Saadat, catching a train towards Giza. and getting off at Boohoth. We walked down a street, over a railway bride and then caught a tut-tut to the top of Shehira’s street.

 

There was a giant inflatable clown at the top of the street and some more inflatables as we walked down. Then we came across the mattresses with the bedding on top. As I understand it they were stuffed with cotton this morning and are part of what we would call the trousseau. Shehira provides this as her part of the contract along with crockery, pots and pans, bins, . . and the husband provides the wooden furniture. We saw everything on tables waiting to be taken into her apartment lining one part of the street, with the blankets hanging between the houses.

Shehira met us and was so pleased to see us even though there must have been over 100 people sat in the street. She took us on a tour of her new apartment. It is on the top floor and has 2 bedrooms,

 

Tara, me, Maddy, Shehira and Malak at the bottom. Tara is Malak’s aunt but her brother died and the mother left Malak to be raised with her.

Then it was time to go downstairs and up into a flat on the other side for some food it seemed had been prepared especially for us. Lamb, rice and various vegetable dishes very on the table for us. It was wonderful to eat Egyptian food, everything was so tasty.

 

Then there was a bit of sitting around, women sat at one end and men at the other,  and taking pictures of the children until it was time to go to the mosque and see Shehira’s signing of the contract, As we sat a gun kept going off to herald each stage, prayers, his signing of the contract,  . . . .

Shehira changed outfits for this bit.

Shoes off and hair modestly covered we went in to see what happened. Finger prints go on each page on top of a passport photo as well as a signature . He had already signed so we just got to see Shehira. Then it was back out into the sunshine for congratulations to the now married couple and pictures.

After this the bride and groom danced together and they were joined by 2 men with big sticks and what can only be described as a pantomime horse. The pictures were taken into the sun so were pretty dreadful. I had said I needed to be at church by 5 so we left everyone to the partying. Maddison had found the music too loud, they did have a lot of speakers in the street. Our reverse journey followed the same path, tut-tut, walk down the alley,  metro. This time we bought some strawberries as the season is coming to an end, the street vendor is cheaper the Carrefour. 5LE a kilo, this is 50 pence a kilo in UK terms (1 New Zealand dollar, a bargain?). 

We didn’t get to church in time, in fact we didn’t get home until 6pm and then it was McDonalds and strawberries for tea.

I shall take the photos to the shop tomorrow and get some prints to give Shehira, I can’t decide whether to scrap them or not, I’ll wait and see it there is a book to put then in first before I decide.

The next celebration is the actual wedding, but I think there is a girls night on the 5th April first that involves henna . . . . . we have been invited so I shall pass on the information.

Sports day 14th March

 

The venue was the Olympic stadium in Maadi so Maddy and I walked across at 8am for an 8:15 start. Of course it didn’t start on time in fact I think we waited over an hour for the festivities to begin. I had been given the job of ‘Finishing Line Official’ and was responsible for making decisions on the final position of the runners. There was a team of timers supporting me and sitting the runners in the final places and mostly things went ok. There were a couple of occasions where the stop watches let us down and at one point it was hard to hear the starter’s air horn. He didn’t get a gun because ‘they’ thought people would be unsettled with it . All in all it was a busy day and I was relieved to be working rather than being on crowd control.

Maddy ran in the 800m, for Thebes, there were 2 competitors and she managed a valiant second.

 

Karnock was the winning house at the end of the day with over 1000 points

my only action snaps of the day.

the hurdles, Mr Brian (head of English department), Mr Jamie announcer and winner of the dreadful shirt competition