A quick visit to Alexandria

Trip Start Jan 22, 2008
1
74
79
Trip End Aug 22, 2008


Loading Map
Map your own trip!
Map Options
Show trip route
Hide lines
shadow
Where I stayed
carillion
(Alexandria hotels)

Flag of Egypt  ,
Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Once again the taxi drivers saw that we were just off the train and were asking far too much to the hotel; so we ended up having a 20 minute walk with our rucksacs to the seafront to find a hotel. I was worried about finding a place to stay since it was the height of the tourist season - when people from Cairo go to Alexandria to escape the heat of Cairo. Thankfully there was room at our chosen location the Carillion Hotel , £16 for a room overlooking the sea , which meant a great view as we were up on the third floor. It also ended up having a great breakfast included - feta cheese and pitta bread with tea.

Although we were both shattered we decided to take a walk along the sea front before the sun set. Hussan, an Egyptian, ended up talking to us on the street and we joined he for a cup of tea on the tiny strip of beach, where hundreds of people were crammed and all the children were playing in the sea near all the boats the wonderous mango stall
the wonderous mango stall
 . We stayed here to watch the sunset and talk about Egypt and such like.

We walked onto the Fort to watch many people doing exactly the same thing before finding Koshery (a local dish of pasta, rice, chick peas, tomatoes and onions for about 40p) before heading back for the night.

We spent the next day visiting the famous library in Alexandria, the planetarium (which wasn't worth it, but funny that i was the only white person so had to wear headphones so i could hear the show in English), walked around the centre, caught up with Hassan and got a bus to Siwa.


http://www.bibalex.org/English/index.aspx
The one thing that i find impressive about the library there is the DAR project they are doing - see below.

DAR acts as a repository for all types of digital material, preserving and archiving digital media, and providing public access to digitized collections. Over 50,000 books and 35,000 images are now available at http://dar.bibalex.org. All out-of-copyright books are available in full for Internet users. For books that are in copyright, Internet users can browse only 5% of the book, but are available from within BA. The DAR system stimulates the like of a library, where you can browse through the books by Dewey Decimal classification, see books that are related to each other by topic or author, and open the book with the book viewer to take a look and explore using its different navigating tools. An interesting feature that can only be accessible in the digital world is a full morphological search of all the books and within their content, with the search results highlighted.
Slideshow Print this entry