Cairo Post 11, Part 1: Power And Lack Thereof, Domestic Air Egypt, Ticket Debacles, Lunch and a Movie with Nour

Just before I got back to my computer the power came back on after being out for a few minutes. Another similar outage prevented me from posting a blog before my group left Cairo for out Nile Cruise last Friday morning because that time the power was out for a good 6 hours+. This is not a complaint about the electric grid here in Cairo, but an explanation as to why I was out of contact for so long. I had planned to write a pre-Nile cruise post detailing what I thought it would be like and such, but alas that did not come to pass. Instead what I am going to do is seperate this post into two parts, one as a general post that might touch on the cruise here and there, and the second part solely dedicated to the cruise. You ready for this?

Begin Part 1...for some strange, but probably not unfounded, reason we made our flight from Cairo to Aswan on Air Egypt seem as though it would be the flight out of hell. In actuality the flight was more spacious then every normal domestic flight I have taken in the United States. Shame on american domestic carriers for jipping us out of room and space. And it had nothing to do with the size of the plane either because flying down we had an Airbus A320-200 and coming back we had the A321-200, both single aisle jets that you will find on domestic carriers in the states (and comparable in size to the Boeing 737 family of planes). I had enough space that when the woman in front of me reclined all the way back, I could still get out of my seat without asking her to pick it up. American carriers, got your acts together and give us the space we deserve.

If one didn't know better, one would think that every ticket agent at every tourist site in Egypt had never seen 1 pound, 5 pound, 10 pound, hell even a 20 pound note in his life before. Why do I say that? Well because almost every single time we have gone to buy tickets with a 50 pound note (roughly $10) the teller responds "no change", even after someone with the correct change gives it to him, he will most times still insist that he hasn't the change. I appreciate not wanting to give up small bills...if you are not a business that services probably a couple thousand people a day. Is it really possible that the Egyptian government provides no change to their ticket tellers, I am inclined to say no. So stop jerking us around Egyptian ticket tellers and give me my change back!

On a much lighter note, yesterday I was finally able to meet up with my fellow Lawrentian Nour Bahgat '08. We had lunch at Al-Azhar Park, which reallllly beautiful, with Lucie, Miranda and Nour's friend Nana.

See the full gallery on posterous

Nour and I had planned to do a dinner last week but things got thrown out of wack once the midterms were announced so it got pushed back to this week. Besides the park being really beautiful, the food was also great. Of course if you know me, you know that I am a big fan of chicken so of course I had a grilled chicken breast dish (in fact after I finish this post, I'm going to run across the street and have a grilled chicken caesar salad sandwich). Well Nour and Nana didn't approve of my mono-meat dish so Nana offered me a piece of her kofta, or lamb. I really don't like trying new things, especially not meats...but it actually wasn't bad and reminded me of sausage a little bit. I think I'll have it again at some point in time. After lunch, Nour and I went to the City Stars mall to watch The Karate Kid...except that the newspaper was wrong and The Karate Kid isn't out yet over here. So instead we saw The A-Team and it was actually quite good...aside from the occasional over reliance on special effects. I think I will watch the movie again when I get home though because I felt as if I was missing some pieces from the story and I think that was due to editing...and there is only one to find out for sure.

Again, thanks for reading and Part 2 should be coming up in a couple hours.

-Diggs

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