We actually made it down to breakfast for the first time on our last morning at the hotel. A fine low-end spread but with all the fixings: rolls, salami, cheese slices, peanut butter, jelly, butter, granola, yogurt, luke-warm soft-boiled eggs, all served up with a push-the-button espresso machine and a boisterous two-year old that was putting more miles on patroling the lobby and pushing the door release button than we thought was humanly possible. It must have been the peanut butter combined with the salami. That’s a combination that will keep anyone moving.
With an hour or two to kill before needing to leave for the train station, we headed out into the brisk morning. Finally, Amsterdam was showing some clear skies and we appreciated every last moment of it. We ducked into a coffeeshop called ‘Homegrown Fantasy’, had some real espresso to let our tastebuds revoke the machine coffee experience, listen to some great ambient music, see if a cafe cat was around, and generally appreciate that Amsterdamian shopkeepers are actually up and smoking pot at 9 AM. No wonder everyone seems so calm in this city.
With a great sigh, we collected our bags and headed over to the train station. And with great goofy grins, we interacted with one of the passport photo booths and gathered 8 passport photos each. I doubt we will need that many, but a photo in the hand is worth hours of hunting for a photo booth in a land of bushes, eh?
The flight from London to Cairo on British Airways was absolutely packed. It is just under 5 hours long and they only fly once a day. We arrived in Cairo at 11 PM and a contact from our hotel came to pick us up, complete with a sign with our names on it. He was there in a suit with a long wool coat and his job was to get us planted into the passport control line, buy us two passport stamps (very much like colorful postage stamps), scoot us forward in the control line, scoot the girl on the cellphone ahead of us forward in line, help the girl remember her carry-on bag, rescoot the girl, rescoot all of us again, disappear for all of two minutes, return to wander like a madman amongst the baggage claim with my bag claim ticket in hand, climb through the baggage claim opening to talk to the crew in the back, return sighing and shaking his head, drag us over to the baggage missing line, pace like a madman while three people in front of us reported missing luggage on the same flight, recollect us after reporting my missing bag, walk us to Timbuktu past the paid parking lot and down a back alley road and finally… hand us off to the gentleman that would drive us to our hotel. With that completed, he flipped the paper with our names around on his very full clipboard to show the next passenger coming in on a KLM flight and bounded back into the airport. Needless to say, we were a bit overwhelmed by our intro to Cairo and it took a few minutes in the van to regain some understanding of the world that just whooshed by us.
Walking through the airport we saw a red carpet entry to a airline gangplank lined with a few police in spiffy uniforms with gold trim and machine guns, which we would soon consider a very normal sight in Cairo. There must be at least one policeman and/or traffic police per every ten Cairo citizens.
The passport control folks have a girl in the back of each booth and hold onto your passport until the number is written down in one of the infamous beaurocracy ledgers. They have quite a bit of surveying of your passport. (At least they let Derrell by without laughing at his picture as the control folks in Amsterdam did. Seems Derrell must have lost about 200 pounds to match his picture they joked. Y’know your day is getting seriously out of control when you are getting ribbed about having a fat looking passport photo. At least the photo booths allow you to pick your image, unlike the evil photographer that took our pictures at the AAA office back in Truckee. Do you think we could sue for emotional damages?)
The first few billboards of note on the 1 AM ride to our hotel were of Coca-Cola in Arabic and Nokia, also in Arabic except for the brand logo. The city was completely alive at 1 AM and we were soon to find that it doesn’t ever go to sleep. 3 and 4 AM and folks are out and about on the streets, doing who knows what.
Our driver informed us it would only take 2 days to teach us how to drive in Cairo. The first day would teach us to ignore the white lines on the road, and the second is to use your horn frequently. The driving is actually not as bad as we expected. There is some method to the madness. Almost all roads are one way streets, so as a pedestrian you only need to look one direction. There are traffic cops at many of the larger intersections, they take precedence over any street lights. Lights at night are completely optional and are available to flash as an alternative to your horn. Horn beeping means something like ‘I’ve got the ball, give me clearance.’ and the other drivers actually recede once a horn is blown. Instructions and directions can always be gotten from the driver flowing down the road next to you. A handy feature, but a bit more disruptive to navigating than say a talking GPS in a Toyota. Anyhow, regardless of the conformity within the seething Boston-like flow of cars, we both agreed that we won’t be driving in Cairo anytime in our lifetimes.
So, the travel day ends with my bag lost, Derrell’s found, and an extra to-do item to call the airport two days later in the morning (next flight that would have my bag is the same 11 PM arrival). We are currently considering how to reallocated all of our stuff in case of complete bag lositude. An idle thought, after the cat has been let out of the missing bag.
