Egypt's Second City

I returned last night from a trip to Alexandria, the second most important city in Egypt after Cairo. Our Lonely Planet guidebook claims that it's currently making a bid to rival Cairo in certain aspects of art and fine society, attempting to use the cultural cachet of its classical Greek heritage to lure foreign tourists and Egyptians alike to its stately coffeehouses where European intellectuals once debated philosophy over liquor and cups of espresso, its grand hotels along the Mediterranean corniche, and its elegant modern library.

But while it's true that the Alexandria of the pre-revolution days was a thriving cultural center, attracting writers, poets, and thinkers from all over the Mediterranean world, today the coffeehouses stand mostly empty, the grandeur of the hotels is long faded into gloominess and dilapidation, and the library, which opened in 2002 to great celebration and hoopla, has yet to acquire more than a few hundred thousand books of its intended 8 million-volume collection. According to the Lonely Planet, the abrupt nationalization of foreign businesses across Egypt that followed Nasser's ascent to power in 1952 prompted non-Egyptians to flee Alexandria in droves, changing it from a cosmopolitan center of 300,000 with a 40 percent foreign population to an ever-growing city of some 5 million people, many of them rural migrants in search of work.

Egypt is in an interesting predicament because it has only one city of any real importance--Cairo--and that city is hugely overpopulated, home to 20 million people yet capable of supporting only a small fraction of that number. Many Cairenes are left without electricity, city services like gas, running water, and garbage collection, or proper political representation, engendering the growth of slum communities that acquire these necessities instead through bribery and theft. Because everything in the country is centered in Cairo--government, economy, tourism, industry, foreign investment, art, movies, education etc.--there's not much reason for anyone to go anywhere else. The result is massive population problems in Cairo and the relegation of Alexandria to secondary-city status, leaving it a mere shell of an urban center that lacks self-sufficiency and purpose.

As a tourist, though, it was a welcome relief to escape the dust and hassle of Cairo and retreat to quieter, cleaner, better-smelling Alexandria. We spent an afternoon on the beach (in bikinis no less, a privilege we paid 60 LE for) and concluded our stay with an al fresco dinner of hummus, tahina, babaghanoug, pickles, cold potatoes, cheese, and grilled eggplant, followed by fried calamari, grilled sea bass, and red snapper, and finally topped off with sweet mint tea. The boy who waited on us was approximately ten years old, chubby, and wearing an orchestra conductor's vest, god only knows why.

Now I'm back in city number one, in my funky apartment that always smells like gas and has temperamental hot water, an elevator with too much personality, and old women selling fish on the sidewalk outside every day so that the lobby has a perpetually fishy odor. Who wouldn't choose to live in Cairo?