Morning of Friday, 17 December, Sheraton Hotel, Alexandria: That last couple of days weren’t very eventful, so I'm informing everyone that I’m okay and haven’t been raped and/or kidnapped.
To begin, I’m sad to say I didn't dine with the Italians, because even a forty-five minute flight from Luxor to Cairo can induce vast amounts of slumbery (And jet lag adds up after traveling by plane thrice times within the same week!). I ended up knocking out at 7 PM and returning to consciousness exactly twelve hours later. On the way out of Cairo I was told that Jacomo nicknamed me “Sid” from Ice Age.
Anyway, we took a cab to a bus station so we could take the “Super Jet” to Alexandria. Of course the bus wasn’t the most impressive thing on four wheels, the seats showing some age and a small pile of rubbish collecting in a corner. The guidebooks say that such a trip takes 2.5 hours, but we quickly learned that 2.5 hours is actually how long it takes to get out of Cairo (due to traffic), which makes that total to five hours in “Egyptian time” AKA "no concern for time." We nicknamed the bus “Super Snail.”
Our entertainment was a few Egyptian films, which were all in Arabic and excruciating to watch, because gollygeewillickers, that acting was so exaggerated and the filmmaking so amateur that the "filmmakers" might get some decent taste and skill from Leave it to Beaver. And looking around, I noticed that the passengers were highly amused by a “dying” man motioning to to his comrades in the woods to leave him to die, and then ten seconds later remembering he had to actually look the part of “dead” (Thunk!). They were also entertained by a rebellious teenager’s victorious display that almost injures her boyfriend’s ribs and nearly knocks off her own boob. I wanted to saw off my leg.
The bus concluded its route five hours later. By cab it took us another hour to get to the hotel because there was just no escaping traffic, whether we were on the main road or on a detour. But fortunately, when the traffic dispersed we got a gander at cosmopolitan life in Alexandria (old, tall, off-white buildings and many, many jewelry and antique stores), and a beautiful view of the Mediterranean Sea at 5 PM along the corniche. It’s too bad that ferries for crossing the Mediterranean no longer exist and our day was wasted, so today we head back to Cairo (hopefully by train this time) to catch a flight to Athens.
Hopefully the airport in Athens hasn’t shut down due to the riots…
