A detox day in Alexandria.

Gentle Readers.

I'm writing this off of the slimmest of all internet connections, plucked out of the air on one tiny bar from someone whose last name appears to be "Thompson." God blesses those who don't password protect their wireless networks. At least, I bless them. I'm sure God does, too.

More importantly, I am writing this from the seaside city of Alexandria--beautiful Alexandria where the air is clean, the Mediterranean Sea sparkling, the traffic slow--and even the cats are plump and calm. 

I needed a day out of Cairo. Gradually, my tolerance for my beloved but overcrowded and polluted city of 20 million has been growing. When I first came to Egypt to study, I found that I could only last in Cairo two weeks at a time before needing a vacation. It was also at this time that my eyebrow developed a twitch that was to last for my entire four months in the Middle East. 

Now, nearly eight months a Cairene veteran, I can push it out to about six weeks before I notice the daily bustle of the city taking its toll on me. Having returned from my travels to the Siwa Oasis, the Red Sea, and Jerusalem well over a month ago, I decided it was time. You know that Cairo must be bad when you retreat to a city of three million to get some peace and quiet. 

I took the train this morning (3 hours Cairo to Alex: $6) at my favorite time of the week: Friday morning. Friday morning in Cairo is the Midwest's equivalent of Sunday morning: peaceful, quiet, and prayerful. The streets are empty, the horns aren't honking. The sunlight was streaming down through the buildings. Taking my seat on the train, I watched the Nile delta pass by me and took in all the pastoral scenes you could never see in the city: children riding donkeys through fields of lush, green crops, men washing their livestock, women taking care of the mudbrick pigeon coops on their roofs. It's a place in Egypt quiet enough to finally hear your own thoughts.

I arrived in Alexandria at noon on a sunny, crisp day, with my bag filled with graduate application materials, a Carlos Casteneda book, mashed potato and babaghanoush sandwiches, sweat pants, and my Bible. After walking a while, I found a hotel room 50 feet from the Mediterranean--with a balcony with a view--for $10. I dumped what I didn't need out of my bag, and set off for the Alexandria library.

Now, this isn't the Alexandria library of the Seven Wonders of the World fame--that one was destroyed centuries ago. But the new one is beautiful in its own, modern right. It's a large glass and steel building with lots of light--and lots of security. So much security, that this might be the one library in the world where you can't bring a laptop or a notebook inside with you. What?! 

So, I settled for the library's cafe, instead. In the end, it was a better deal--Turkish coffee makes applications that much sweeter. Watching the sun set over the Mediterranean harbor from inside the cafe, I felt a deep peace and relaxation that's hard to find within the cement maze of Cairo. Best of all, I haven't heard any screeching cats. Yet.

So, now supplied with half a pound of melt-your-face baklava, I'm going to enjoy a quiet night inside my hotel room. True, I haven't done anything in Alexandria that I couldn't be doing in Cairo--most of my day was spent inside a cafe, after all. But, that's just the point: I'm not in Cairo. As much as I love my city--today, it's a welcome change.