Saturday, February 23

During the past three days, we enjoyed a 3 day weekend traveling to Port Said. Along the way, we stopped off at Ar-Rashid (Rosetta). Ar-Rashid is where the western branch of the Nile empties into the Mediterranean Sea. Rosetta (the English name) is best known as the site of the discovery of the famous Rosetta Stone – the key for deciphering hieroglyphics. The original stone is now located in the British Museum in London. During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, Rosetta was Egypt’s most vital port. With the continued growth of Alexandria, Rosetta has become primarily a fishing community. In about 6 weeks, President Mubarek is scheduled to visit so the city is undergoing a major facelift. We visited the citadel where the actual stone was found in the early 1800’s and then toured a couple of restored merchant homes. These homes feature intricate “mashrabiyyas” wooded screens that serve as windows. These allow the occupants to look out but those on the outside cannot look in. Throughout the city, we saw several old 56 Fords – all in running condition. At one time Fords must have been big in this area.

As we left Rosetta, we were accompanied the rest of the trip both to Port Said and back to Alexandria by a security detail. We traveled by a private van with a security vehicle leading the way – most times there were 3 to 4 armed officers in the lead vehicle. They would take us for 20 to 30 miles and then “hand us off” to a new crew. We asked our driver why this was happening and he told us that the government wants to make sure that Americans are safe when they travel outside of the major cities (Alex and Cairo). This is especially true when traveling to the Suez area which could be considered a prime target for sabotage. Part of the way, we also had a vehicle with armed officers behind us as well.

Port Said is a quiet city located where the Mediterranean Sea is joined to the Red Sea by the Suez Canal. The actual idea of a canal connecting the two seas began in 600 BC but it wasn’t until 1869 that the canal was actually finished by the French. The Egyptians took over control of the canal in 1956. Port Said is home to some great fish restaurants and a large “duty-free” shopping area. We enjoy walking along the canal and taking a ferry from Port Said to Port Fuad across the canal. Ships that sail through this area are quite large and the fees they pay to the government have become a major source of income for Egypt. The pace of life at Port Said is much slower than Alexandria. It was actually fairly safe crossing the streets!

Wednesday, February 20

The weather has turned downright cool here with temperatures in the high 40’s and low 50’s and a lot of rain. Monday it rained so much that many students and teachers were unable to get to school on time. Several were an hour late as the streets were flooded in spots and cars couldn’t get through. Hopefully it will warm up before the 3 day weekend which begins Thursday. We are planning on leaving Alex for the weekend and visiting Port Said to see the Suez Canal and along the way stop off where the famous Rosetta Stone was found. We are traveling with two other teachers for a weekend of R and R.

Monday evening we joined three others and attended a special concert at the Alexandria Opera House. The concert was presented by the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra as part of their “Jazz on the Nile 2008” tour – a series of 4 concerts presented in Cairo and Alex. The show was fantastic. The 20 piece orchestra played selections from Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones and of course, Louis Armstrong. A singer and two dancers accompanied the orchestra on several of the tunes. They brought the house down with a special rendition of “What a Wonderful World” with special lyrics for Egypt. The concert was sponsored in part by Her Excellency, Mrs. Suzanne Mubarek (wife of the President of Egypt), the US Embassy and the Egyptian Minister of Culture and Tourism. The Opera House was a fitting venue for the concert – it has been carefully restored and is very elegant. It was nice to see the house nearly full – hopefully this will encourage other events such as this one.

Monday, February 18

It has been an exciting week on the shores of the Mediterranean. Last Sunday the Egyptian National Soccer team squared off against Cameroon in the finals of the African Cup. The African Cup is like the Super Bowl of soccer in Africa. Even though the Egyptian team had won the previous 5 cups, they were considered underdogs after losing to Cameroon earlier in the year. The match started at 7:00 PM and throughout Alexandria, people were glued to their TV sets. Most local businesses which had TV’s had them on and turned to the game – crowds of people were huddled around watching the game. In the 75^th minute of the game, the Egyptian team scored on a remarkable play (one that is now featured on YouTube) and held on to defeat Cameroon 1-0. As the horn went off signaling the end of the game – chaos broke out throughout the city of Alexandria (and probably all of Egypt). People went out into the streets – drums were pounding, horns honking and people were everywhere. It was almost impossible to drive as cars were everywhere and the streets were blocked. People would get out of their cars, waving the national flag and dance in celebration. A group of our students were coming back from Cairo from the EMAC arts festival and it took them 3 hours to go from Carrefour to Schutz (a trip that normally takes 20 to 30 minutes). People had aerosol cans and they would spray them and then light the fumes as well as set off firecrackers. The celebration went on for hours.

The members of the winning Egyptian team all received hefty financial bonuses. We’ve heard that some received up to a million dollars with much of the money coming from other oil-rich Arab nations. Soccer is such a big sport here and there are many corporate sponsors throughout the Middle East. Everywhere you go in the city, there are kids playing soccer anywhere here is an open area (even on the streets). The big payment comes at a time when Egypt itself is in the midst of an economic crisis of some degree. Prices of many staple food items has risen 2 to 3 times (such items as wheat, flour, rice, cooking oil). Throughout the city there are public assistance bakeries that sell bread (similar to pita bread) to the people for less than 1 cent each. We have noticed the lines at these public assistance bakeries much longer than in the past. Many people cannot afford to pay the prices at regular bakeries and grocery stores. Alexandria really seems like two different cities when you move from the neighborhood to San Steffano or Carrefour where the wealthy hang out.

We went to a dentist on Saturday to have a checkup and cleaning. This is a different one than we went to last year. He was trained in Canada and practiced there for many years before coming back to Alex. When he left, the city was less than 500,000 and now it is over 6,000,000.

Sunday, February 10

Internet access is nearly repaired throughout much of the area. A recently release news story ruled out sabotage as the cause for cutting the cables. It is now believed that stray 5.5 ton anchor cut a cable near Dubai – they are still not sure what caused the cuts in the cables between Alex and Palermo. New cables that are and will be laid are to “resilient" against cuts and "provide diversity in routes." This provided a good teaching point for my high school IT class – we take for granted the access that we have throughout the world for telecommunications and the Internet and often don’t think about how the infrastructure has been set up. As we have mentioned earlier in our blog, we recently completed a major overhaul of our infrastructure for our network which took nearly a year to finish. Guess we can’t complain too much with limited access for a couple of weeks!

We will not be able to field a boys or girls basketball team this year. We barely have enough boys (7 – 10 is recommended) to compete and even fewer girls (5). Of all the sports here, basketball has been the one in recent years that have had difficulty fielding a team. The girls have not had a team for 3 years while the boys have barely had enough the past two years. This year the ISAC organization made it clear that if a school couldn’t field both teams, they would not be allowed to send any teams. I am going to continue to practice with the young men that I have and try to find a couple younger boys. The school made a decision this year to only field varsity teams, hoping that the older students would participate – but it did not work. We would have had enough at both boys and girls if we would have had only JV teams as the interest is with the younger players.

Over the weekend both Pat and I got our haircut. Pat went back to Green Plaza to Ahmed – she had gone to a different place in San Steffano the past couple of times because it was closer. Ahmed is indeed an artist. He was very happy to see her and took her right away even though there were others waiting. I went down Schutz Street to my guy, Sala. He was finishing a young boy when I came and the boy’s father, who is learning English, began a conversation with me. He seemed like a pleasant man. Later on, when I was getting my hair cut – he came back and asked me a computer question. His office was about 5 minutes away by car and I told him that I would take a look at his problem. So we hopped into his car, went to his office and looked at the problem that he was having. It was kind of an unusual issue. He took a windows system, reformatted the hard drive and installed the Mac operating system so he could run a video editing program. As is the case throughout much of the area, both the operating system software and the editing program software were not from “original” software installations, so without the original installation disks, I was unable to get things to work properly. We spent about 90 minutes at his office before he brought me back to the school. When I told Pat where I was and what I had been doing, she asked if I was worried about getting into a car with a man I just met and going off somewhere with him – guess when she put it that way I wondered why I hadn’t thought about that. It would be hard to imagine doing anything like that in a city of 6,000,000 back in the states – but here I didn’t even give it a second thought. As we have often said, the neighborhood around our school, while lower working class – is very safe and everyone looks out for each other.

Sunday, February 03

On Wednesday morning (January 29), Internet access to Egypt and much of the Middle East (including two continents) was cut off. Apparently the fiber optic cables that run between Europe and Egypt were damaged just off the shores of Alexandria. It seems that the cables were disrupted due to rough waters and possibly a ship (possibly its anchor). After almost 18 hours, service was partially restored. Access was limited and extremely slow. We could only access some sites and even then not all of the sites were available. When this occurred you have a feeling of being cut off and isolated. We rely so much on the Internet at school as well as at home. E-mail was sporadic – only a small percentage actually would get through. We were unable to “SKYPE” as the limited bandwidth would not allow for a stable connection. Of course we were unable to do any of our financial and business communication back home. Saturday morning service improved as they are routing Internet traffic through some other cables and satellites but by the afternoon, access again stopped as another line was cut. As we post this, we are back up at least temporarily.

The weather was beautiful on the weekend– clear blue skies and temperatures in the mid 60’s. We enjoyed a nice long walk in the morning. It was the first nice days in a nearly a week as temperatures have been in the mid to low 50’s with rain nearly every day. On our walk we met a former student who is attending college in Cairo. He was involved in a traffic accident the day after Christmas. He was turning onto the Corniche and was struck by a taxi. The driver of the taxi claimed to be injured and since he was taken to the hospital for a checkup, the young man was locked up in jail for a day. He will be going to trial soon and is hopeful that the court will rule in his favor.

We started basketball practice last Monday. I am not sure if we will be able to have a team to travel. According to the organization that we belong to, we have to send both a boys and a girl’s team to the tournament. Right now it looks as though there will not be enough girls interesting in playing to field a team. I do not have many more boys but I think we would have enough. I have a couple of boys who have been playing quite a bit and it would be a shame if we were not able to take a team. There is so many things going on right now and kids are traveling for MUN, Fine Arts, etc. If we have a team – it will be made up primarily of Indian students along with one American, one Brit and a couple of Egyptians.