Rides

Alexandria is a city whose residents are almost all indigenous. At least that is what it feels like. It is not like Cairo, or Dubai, or New York - people do not move to Alexandria; rather, they return to it.

And so, every time I'm there, I think about what it might be like to have lived in the same place for most of one's life. To now and again pass by places where you used to play as a kid, or your old school, or the roads on which you first learned to drive. I think about what the town was like when my parents were growing up in it - my mother running around the beach, sneaking onto fishing boats and into elite yacht clubs, and my dad, mostly indoors, being educated in a language which he would never use as an adult. (Oh the remnants of colonialism.) How different, and how similar, childhood was then, in the fifties and sixties, when there were so few machines through which imagination was restricted, molded.

It's a pretty town. The corniche is long and the Mediterranean is moody. Leaving a coffee shop the other night, my cousin M and I spontaneously decided that, despite the freezing cold, we were going to take a horsedrawn carriage home. They mostly service tourists and unmarried couples desperate for privacy, but I had never ridden one and it seemed like the kind of thing you should do at least once. So we rode down the beach, taking occassional swigs of pineapple vodka from a flask which M has nonchalantly been carrying around. (I don't know if I should be concerned about this new habit of hers. I will think about that once I get past the satisfaction derived from the sheer cliche-ness of getting into the car after a stressful family dinner and asking her to pass the booze.)

I think a lot when I'm being transported. On the drive back to Cairo I thought about how demure Alexandria seems to be now, when thought about in the context of its mammoth history. I thought about how it used to be a place people moved to, how it was a center for Hellenism and I wondered how long it took for the town to feel so comfortably Egyptian. I thought about how it was once the greatest Jewish city in the world, and I wondered what relics remained, physical or not, of that culture, besides the creepy cemetary which can be seen from my late grandmother's balcony.

I particularly enjoyed listening to Madonna's Music album in the late afternoon during the drive back; the desert stretched out on both sides of the road, with an impressive frequency of farms and compounds, layed out in such a way that the greenery seems (is) contrived, defiant. The car was quiet for most of the ride, but it was a nice kind of quiet, the kind which you can only enjoy with certain people. I thought about that too, how sometimes it seems like everyone's life is transitioning all around me, how they're waiting for a change that they know is right around the corner.