Bibliotheca Alexandrina

One of the reasons we wanted to visit Alexandria was to see the new library, completed a few years ago and dedicated to the memory of the Great Library in Alexandria set up by Ptolemy I. The new library is housed in an impressive building but only had about 500,000 volumes currently, with a capacity to grow to over 2 million volumes in the future. We also learned that it's home to one of the few Internet Archives in the world and the first one outside the US!

It was a big day for field trips to the library and there were many different school-aged children there, many of whom were from smaller towns and who were very curious about Amara and Narisa. We ended up chatting with quite a few of them, although they seemed to run through a standard set of questions with all foreigners ("What's your name? Where you from? How old are you?").

We also visited Fort Qaitbey, which stands on the site of the famed Lighthouse of Pharos, another of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, destroyed by an earthquake centuries ago. In the spirit of recycling, many of the old lighthouse's granite blocks were reused in the fort, and can be identified among the rest of the limestone blocks.