St. Mark's and St. Mark's

Dear readers,

The last weekend we had in Alexandria was only one day long, and none of us had anything planned. Some of us wanted to go to Montaza (though I didn't, since I had already been), and some wanted to go to the Mansheya market for the umpteenth time. Others had already left for home, choosing to skip the last day of the program. The rest of us were fresh out of ideas, so after consulting the Interwebs, we decided to check out two cathedrals -- and each of them, incidentally, were called St. Mark's.

St. Marks #1 (i.e. the first St. Mark's we tried to visit) is a gorgeous Coptic cathedral about a 10-15 minute walk from our hotel.

Gorgeous on the outside:

And gorgeous on the inside, architecturally:

and in terms of actual pieces of artwork, like these:

I think there was a service going on when we went there (on a Friday), and a man was giving a sermon, but very few people were there, and even fewer were paying attention. (It was sad; the only reason why I wasn't listening was because I understood very little of what he was saying.)

After that, we tried to get to St. Mark's #2 -- a.k.a. St. Mark's Pro-Cathedral, so named because it's the first Anglican cathedral in Egypt. It was a little tricky to find. We thought this gate led to it:

 But then we went in, and all we found was this sad old courtyard, full of trash and peeling paint:

 After a few minutes of further searching and asking for directions, we finally found it! ...but it was closed. So I took this photo through a fence:

 

 In case you were wondering, this is the view we missed out on, i.e. what it looks like from behind all the trees:

(I took the photo from Google Images.)

So that was a nice way for us to spend our last weekend afternoon in Alexandria! It was very fun and spontaneous. 

Thanks for reading, folks!

Beth