Egypt - Alexandria on Day 2

     After the long day of going to Cairo, we were up "early" again and were off touring the city of Alexandria.  Although we were going to stay "local", the tour lasted from 8:30 until 2 pm.  Judy continued to mention how she was disappointed in the city.  I guess she thought that it would be something exotic and it is anything but that.  It is very dirty with holes all over the place.  No place except one that we visited was clean as we know it.

   The tour had 3 stops.  The first was the museum where local

Pompey's Pillar

artifacts were displayed.  It certainly did not have the flare of Cairo with the King Tut artifcts but it was well done.  They recently found thousands of artifacts - statues, pillars, etc. on the bottom of the bay.  Much had been dumped there to prevent naval forces from entering the harbour.
    Our second stop was Pompey's Pillar which is the tallest remaining ancient monument in the area.  It is made of solid granite and is the only thing standing in a temple area that had hundreds(?) of shorter columns.  All the rest are on the ground or in the bay!  I don't know if they re-erected this one column after the earthquakes that destroyed the temple.  Two things are of interest here.  First it was the only place that did not have the "dollar boys" hounding you at every step.  To be fair the museum was free of them as well.  The second was that the grounds did not have one piece of litter in it.  This is the older part of the

City Street

city with slums all around.  Here we are looking at this ancient temple and are impressed by the lack of hawkers and garbage!   The other item of interest here was the "daughter" library to the one destroyed by fire.  It was a common practice to have a library with temples.  It was carved out beneath the temple and some of the books that were saved from the great fire were stored in nooks carved (shelves) in the wall of the passageways.  Unfortunately these books were also burned on order from of the Christians later because they were "pagan".  Funny, some of the oldest bible copies were among the items.

Dockside Shopping

      The third stop was the Roman catacombs.  These are not like the ones in Rome where the Christians were burried but rather Roman catacombs.  They date to the first to third century.  They are on 3 levels.  The original one was for some wealthy family and then they just kept carving.  The lowest level if filling with water because of changes to the water table caused by the building os the Aswan dam.  It was under an old garbage dump and found when a donkey of a garbage collector fell  through the ceiling of the tombs.
       All in all a very interesting place. Next _ Sea day then Khios, Greece.