Egypt 19 Nov 2022

Written on the morning of Nov 20

On the 18th we took the bus up to Alexandria, 200 km away.

We stopped at Pompey’s Pillar, which he had nothing to do with, and we went and looked at some tombs and the Serapeum of Alexandria. The Serapeum is where they buried the bulls, known as Apis Bulls. It was a cult that admired a bull with certain marking and thought it holy. When one died it was buried in a large sarcophagus, and another bull was then found. Kind of like the Dali-Lama. The cult survived for longer than Chritianity has been around, just to put it in perspective. It is the trademark of Nova-Nordisk, the bull with the sun disk between its horns. 

The Serapeum here was rather poor compared to the one a Saqqara. Here it’s more of a descending staircase that ends in nothing, while at Saqqara it’s a double parallel wide hallway with huge chambers off to each side with giant sarcophagus in each. In Alexandria there was none of that. When I came out of the long staircase I saw another opening called the Sanctuary or something like that. I went down that long corridor and at the end they had a black casting of an Apis bull, suitable for selfies.

Alexandria itself sits on the Mediterranean. You can see the huge sweeping bay of a port with a fort on the western finger where the famous lighthouse once stood. The port is lined with big restaurants with names like Wave, and Luna Park. A new very modern looking Library of Alexandria sits where the old one once was. 

After you get away from the port, the city devolves into streets with tiny streets off of them. The tiny streets may have room to park a car on one side. Some do not even have that much space and the cars are parked one in front of the other and the whole street is one long parking lot. How a person gets their car out from the middle of the pack is a mystery to me. 

Cairo and Alexandria both have the problem of dust. It settles on everything. Therefore, anything outside looks grimy and dirty. The fancy hotel we stayed in managed to keep the dirt down because it is in a park that used to be reserved for the king and there is grass around the back of the building. The front faces a beach and the Sea. Nonetheless a man with two wide dust mops hooked together to form a V is constantly walking the floor of the lobby. How does he hold onto two wide dust mops at once? You have the two handles come up in an X frame which is joined at the intersection – very clever.

As we drove down the streets just wide enough for our gigantic bus to pass, I would see trash. Trash in the canals, at the ends of alleys, in vacant lots of which there were many. These vacant lots were really places where whatever had been there was torn down and the rubble was left.

Yesterday, then19th we left our hotel and went along the coast to Taposiris Magna. Notice the first word has the name Osiris in it, which is the Egyptian god of the underworld. A woman named Kathleen Martinez has been working there for 15 or more years. I remembered her from an episode of “Josh Gates Expedition Unknown.” In that show Josh went down in a oil drum elevator. Literally it was an oil drum connected to a winch that was run on a Briggs and Stratton one lunger. Before Josh went down they made sure the engine would start. “We want to make sure we can get you back up,” Kathleen had said. Josh looked at the camera like, “What?”

I had to ask Kathleen what it was like to work with Josh. In her slow measured quiet English (she is Dominican-Egyptian) she said, “Oh Josh is a lot of fun.”

She then went on to say he was the only TV person to go down in the bucket elevator. All the other crews looked at the set up and give her the camera.