Observations: People sleeping on ground everywhere -- smell of the drains -- local dress appears to be like our pajamas, less stylish than the Bedouins. Many women in modern dress. Dirt everywhere! Candles & carts at night (?), round hats. The men who pushed, the women who kept poking us with their fingers to get through the crowd. The ocean and the trees, the canals and the buffalos in the water across from Nassar's palace.
The Libyans don't even trust the Egyptians that they know personally.
Went to the zoo with our Libyans (where Gail thought the zookeeper was so nice for letting her feed the camels -- she didn't notice the Libyans paying him off for every peanut she fed the camels!) Then visited the hospital which was VERY clean. The Egyptian "friend: of the Libyans kept announcing in every store that we wanted to change American money (this is illegal save in the banks). He had been taken along to help us bargain, but we soon discovered that we did better by ourselves, without the help of a native who knew the customs or spoke the language.
We were told stories about the secret police, the great no., the disguises, the great percentage -- the story about the three brothers, all of whom were secret police, none of whom knew the others were!
Everyone wanted us to change money -- give us hashish & whiskey (?) The boys we were with said that Libyans in general were wealthy, but had no place to spend their money. There's a huge American Colony there (Firestone -- with a semi-govmt., etc.)
You always have to pay bakshish -- even to park on the street. The boys left us, or rather dropped us at our house, and we slept. Then went to the stupid post office.
Impressions: flies, sores on the feet, bad eyes, but in some ways not as bad as we had thought, or expected we might find. Although we would eat the food we would find in stalls in other parts of the Middle East, we were afriad to do so in Egypt.
Then we went to the little casino by the sea, we spent hours drinking lemonade, eating kebab, salad, grapes. The fruit is very different -- very sweet -- like nectar, or perfume. Almost everyone is barefoot.
N.B. Yesterday, on WBUR, heard about an Alexandrian woman poking a reporter with her finger, and I was interested to note that the behavior I recorded in the first paragraph above persists to this day!
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