Perfume & Indian – Monday 19 March 2007

Today was Alana and Mike’s last day in Cairo. I was still feeling a bit fragile but about 10 million times better than yesterday.

They spent the day at the Museum and Khana-Khalili. They saw Stevie at the Museum just as they were leaving

Stevie is supposed to be on his 28 days off and Brian is here working. The reason Stevie is still here is because last week, just as he was supposed to be getting on the plane to fly home - he lost is passport. As a consequence he’s been bumming round Cairo for the last week waiting for his new passport to be processed. That finally came through today, but too late to sort out his visa so tomorrow he has to fight his way through Egyptian bureaucracy to get his visa to be reinstated – its been very very very time consuming and much harder work than I ever though possible.

I assumed that your local embassy would help get it all sorted out and have yo on your way to your home country in a couple of days – apparently this is some fantasy stemming from my youthful optimism that everyone helps everyone else out. The embassy doesn’t really do much at all, and in fact if Wesley hadn’t arranged for a retired police general to help Stevie out he wouldn’t have even got the police report filed. When he went to the station, even though he had this retired police general with him it took 2 hours to find a police man who spoke enough broken English to do the police report. In the end he gave Stevie a pen and piece of paper and said ‘I was walking through Ma’adi’ – Stevie’s just looking at him going what the?!!? The guy then points at the paper with his finger and says again ‘I was walking through Ma’adi’ – so Stevie cottons on that he’s suppose to write this stuff down. His police report ends up reading: ‘I was walking through Ma’adi and I lost my passport and I blame nobody’.

Police report in hand its then off to the embassy to apply for a passport – only to be told 5-10 working days for it to be processed. He thinks the girl behind the counter took pity on him from the expression on his face coz then she said quietly ‘usually we have it sorted in about 3-4 working days’. Even still, with the weekend in the middle it still took nearly a week to get his passport.

This has been an interesting lesson for me though – I really assumed the embassy’s role was to help its people who were stuck in foreign countries – apparently not so much!

Anyways, after the Museum and Khana Khallil Alana and Mike came out to work and checked their emails while Chris and I finished up. Then we went to a perfume factory so Alana and I could pick up some pretty new scents.

We were going to go to the silver jewellery factory but we ran out of time. I’d made reservations at the Indian restaurant at Mina House. Mina House is a historic old hotel that’s in the ‘1001 Things to see before you die’ and the Indian restaurant is suppose to be the best Indian in Cairo.

It was a really nice meal – full silver service. I didn’t eat much coz I am still a bit fragile, but what I had (mostly naan!!) was lovely.