Brendan Doms

A brisk breeze blows directly into my face, bringing with it that distinctive and familiar sea-salt smell. I am talking in broken half-French and half-English with Ann, one of the two French-Canadians I met at the Ramses train station in Cairo. She and her friend have been traveling around the entire world since last September and are just now starting their trek back home. 8 months of hostels and trains and planes and buses? The thought is staggering.

She says that English is the international tourism language, and since she only had an academic understanding of it before leaving Quebec, her skills have much improved. The French even go so far as to respond to her foreign dialect in English.

I ask her a few questions about her travels, trying to get a quick summary of what things are like around the globe:

• Best food? Thailand.
• Biggest surprise? No one in Turkey knows English.
• What weren’t you prepared for? Winter in China.
• Worst weather? Upper Egypt (about 1000 km south of Cairo).
• Best SCUBA diving? The Red Sea.

We are walking toward the water, on a major thoroughfare full of shops. After a few minutes she turns to me and says, “I am glad you are here. Being just a group of girls in Egypt is very hard. If you are not with a man, you get harassed all the time. It is like all the men think they can sleep with a white girl whenever they want.” I nod, but her comment has left a bad taste in my mouth.

We finally can see the water, and it is dazzling. The weather in Alexandria is a huge improvement over Cairo, being a lot farther North and on the Mediterranean. Its bay is shaped like a crescent, a fitting symbol.

We part ways, she to her hotel and me to explore the city. And I am hit with my biggest disappointment of the trip so far: it is Friday, the holy day of the Muslim week, so the Library at Alexandria, which was the main attraction I came to see, is closed. I content myself with wandering around the city.

There are far fewer tourists in Alexandria, and the people there are more just living life rather than trying to squeeze pennies out of tourists. I barely got noticed at all. This combined with the better weather makes me appreciate the city a lot.

The real memorable thing for me was the train ride back and forth. It is what convinced me that Egypt is very much still a third-world country, in need of some change. In the small villages between cities there is trash everywhere. Buildings that are obviously habited are falling apart. No roads are paved. It’s like somebody was building up some ifrastructure, and then at some point (30 years ago? 50?) the work just stopped. And so did repairs, and painting, and all other manner of upkeep. I don’t really know what happened, but some external force will be required to get the country back into shape.