On a steamy, sand-stormed day in Cairo in early April, the seafood in Alexandria tasted especially fresh.
The waterfront walk down the Corniche, charming in its own right with Technicolor fishing boats bobbing in a harbor framed by the modern build-up of Egypt’s long-ago trumped second city, was all the better knowing that in Cairo that day there was no Mediterranean breeze but the swirl of desert air and city dust – a minor turab.
It will be a few months until Alexandria and its coastal environs fill with Cairenes fleeing the heat of the capital. Before then, steal away from Cairo for a day on the north coast.
While staying a night might suit, there is satisfaction in cramming it all in.
Leave Cairo early morning by train or bus, arrive in Alex before lunch, have a day around town that ends with the afternoon sun and the sea crashing against Fort Qaitbey, where the Pharos lighthouse might have stood – and be back in Cairo by nightfall for dinner and a felucca, trading the Mediterranean for the Nile.
Alexandria’s hubristic tagline, ‘gem of the Hellenistic world,’ is more justified by history than by ruins, which are noticeably short in a city running off the sea breeze and an imagination of its busy, layered past.
It is still a meeting point of religions (ancient Egypt meets ancient Greece and Rome; Coptic Christianity and Islam) whose ancient monuments are a scattered shred of a city whose history includes Alexander the Great and Cleopatra.
Most of ancient, Rome-rivaling Alexandria is under layers of sediment and building, or underwater. The Roman catacombs of Kom Ash-Shuqqafa, discovered in 1900 when the ground gave through for a passing donkey, are most interesting for their Roman-Egyptian wall art – think Anubis in a tunic.
The only Roman amphitheater in Egypt was not discovered until the mid-20th century, but even now its placement confuses.
Surrounded by weary modern apartment blocks like the mound topped by Pompey’s famed pillar, the amphitheater site relates more about the contemporary city than anything having to do with Augustus, as brutal modern buildings and the faded pomp of Lawrence Durrell’s pre-World War II city are piled on the city’s literally sunken past.
The city of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet may have withered too under nationalization and Nasserism, after King Farouk’s yacht scooted out of the harbor for Italy, but you can still find a strong cup of coffee in the city.
Sexual liaisons and political intrigue worthy of the Indian-born British writer, by all accounts, have been imported west, to Al-Agami.
The Alexandria National Museum, in a restored Italianate villa, houses Greco-Roman, ancient Egyptian, and Islamic and Coptic art. It is well-lit, air-conditioned, and except for the sweeping, slanted beams that cut through the villa’s stairwell and ornate galleries – an overzealous attempt at some vaguely architectural flash in a perfectly grand old building – it is an ideal stop before lunch.
Which leaves the seafood. Many of the city’s pick-your-fish restaurants, where ordering means selecting your fresh seafood and specifying how to cook it, are spread out near and along the Corniche in Anfushi.
Fish Market is the city’s most famous, and so most-frequented fish restaurant. The knocks are the tourist crowds and the higher prices. The charms are fresh salads and fresher seafood – grilled sea bass, calamari, and shrimp – served in a room perched above the harbor.
Alcohol is served, and looking around the restaurant at the silhouettes of businessmen raising glasses of white wine by a window in front the open harbor, one could be mistaken for Miami or Boston on a good summer day.
Spearing fresh seafood and watching old fishing boats lean on their moorings, it could be the 1940s, except for the reflection of a huge sun disk down the Cornice that is the roof of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a modernist reincarnation of the city’s ancient library.
It is waiting to be filled with books.
