Librarian Mecca: Bibliotheca Alexandrina!

 As many of you know, I happen to have an occupational predilection towards libraries.  They excite me with their stores of fantastic knowledge and excellent organization.  Also, the big deal ones?  They tend to be kind of architecturally gorgeous.  Also:  books.  They've got them!  For all these reasons and more (as in, hello opportunity to visit the worlds first library even though the original was burned like six times so it's really not the real deal but whatever), I was stoked to visit the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.  And let me have you know: it is worth a trip.  I gasped when I walked in.  It is really that impressive, huge, and flat out architecturally gorgeous.  I want to go to there every day.  I want to work there.  I want to sneak in and live there in the way that the kids in From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler live in the Met.  No joke.  Am I gushing?  Is the Pope Catholic?  Deal.  I warned you of my occupational predilection.  

Tahrir, Feluca, Koshuri, Sunset and a Stella

 As you can see from the above image, I walked around downtown Cairo today, which included a trip to the world famous recent home of the Egyptian revolution, Tahrir Square.  The square has largely been cleaned up - the army came in last week and forcibly removed lingering protester and thusly, there aren't a terrible number of street vendors selling January 25th memoribilia.  The Square still has some visible markers of the revolution; many sidewalks were chipped away by Revolutionary fighters to use as stone ammunition against the government thugs.  These sidewalks are now just swaths of sand, which is odd and quite the visual reminder.