alexandria, egypt

March 2018

From January 2018 to March 2018 we were staffed to a project in Alexandria, Egypt. I’m more than a year late with this post so please forgive me! Originally our crew included four people but Divvy had to go back to Delhi for a visa run and Sequoia ended up getting staffed to another project part of the way through. It ended up being only Michael and I remaining by the time we left Egypt.

So I have a lot of photos of Michael posing around town now.

Alexandria was colder than I was expecting. I actually had to go buy sweats at the mall since it got chilly at night. In my head I guess I just thought, “Oh I’m going to Egypt which = hot” clearly forgetting that Alexandria was on the Mediterranean. We used Uber to get around town initially, but around the last month of our time there Uber was no longer operating and we had to take taxis. None of us speak any Arabic so it was a lot of pointing at google maps or making hand gestures on when to turn and when to go straight.

There were a few touristy places in Alex that we visited: The Citadel, Library of Alexandria, and Montaza Palace.

We found a little dive bar in Alex as well and spent a lot of time around the restaurants (and the cats) in the Lebanese Consulate area.

The Citadel of Qaitbay

The Citadel of Qaitbay is situated on the site of the Lighthouse of Alexandria. I think it was one of the first tourist attractions we went to when we first arrived. You can tour the inside of the citadel and there are some really great views of the ocean and the bay. A lot of families and tour buses stop here so it can get a bit crowded on a nice day.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

The trip wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the Library of Alexandria. They actually run tours of the Library every so often throughout the day so it was nice to hear about some of the history of the building and the architecture. The library also had museums in the basement area. I didn’t take a lot of pictures here, but I thought it was a really nice space. They had a nice collection of artifacts and art pieces in the museums.

Montaza Palace

Ok real talk, I didn’t really spend much time at the palace itself. We came here to fish haha. If you know me, you’d know I LOVE fishing, am I good at it? No, but to me it’s thrilling. I only ended up catching that tiny lil fish and it was caught on a hand line. We went with two engineers from our site and they had fishing supplies. This was the first time I have ever used little shrimps to fish but it was really fun! We didn’t catch much haha, but the views were nice at sunset. Highly recommend renting a boat here if anyone makes it back to Alexandria for anything.

Food & Drink in Alexandria

We spent about three months in Alexandria and went to a variety of places that I thought were pretty good:

1. Country Hills - American food, after months of eating foul and falafel we wanted some variety. They actually have Chicago deep dish pizza here! This is the only place I’ve seen deep dish pizza outside of the states. Their mac and cheese was also pretty good

2. Mori Sushi - Pretty decent sushi, in a nice area where there are a lot of cafes and other dessert places for after dinner

3. Terminal 9 - Lebanese food and wings, I got really obsessed with this pomegranate molasses and chicken liver dish here. They also had an area that had another menu? It was like a restaurant within a restaurant but they specialized in wings.

4. Crave - A more upscale restaurant with really great views at sunset

5. Santa Lucia - French/Italian place, super upscale, they have live music sometimes

6. Casino Al Shatby - Good place for some mocktails, shisha, and sunset watching. Located downstairs of Crave.

7. Spitfire - A dive bar, seems like it’s popular with contractors who’ve passed through Alex. Michael got a shirt from here which fit like an 2XL but the neck opening was like a child’s shirt.

Misc

We spent such a long time in Egypt that I have accumulated a lot of miscellaneous photos from around town. Here’s just a dump of photos and videos featuring Sequoia’s going away, the small trampoline park near the hotel, Michael’s cats, Michael leaning against stuff, and just our day to day.

Leaning Michael of Egypt

-s.c.