transit

19 December. 08

in transit:
I got stuck in the Cairo airport for about six hours. The flight to Cairo was nice and distracting - books, vapidly entertaining movies, and bad food kept the time moving. Didn't sleep at all. We arrived in Cairo at 5 pm NY time. Now it is waiting time. Bummer because there is
absolutely nothing to do here. No shops with magazines in any language - only chairs staring out a glass window onto the airport, brown land, and apartment buildings (it looks like the city has grown up around the airport which is kind of cool). There is, however, a Starbucks, a Cinnabon, and a McDonalds which, I find, is rather creepy. I'm avoiding them, opting instead for an Egyptian coffee shop: $12 american for a muffin, an espresso and a ginormous bottle of water.

My Arabic is responded to with soft English. Brown skinned English speakers are responded to in Arabic.

I don't understand the logic of the airport here. We arrived and I followed the crowd to passport control, missing the small sign off to the sign that said "transit". Stood in line and when I got to the front he told me I had to go to "transit" which, apparently, means flight transfers. I was herded into a little room with two young guys from the US who hold dual US - Sudanese citizenship wondering if we were to be forgotten or somehow we would get to where we needed to go. They study in North Carolina and were going home to see family. They were Muslim and seemed to feel that the Arab/Muslim expansion into Christian/animist black southern Sudan was the way it should go. They also talked about all the development and the new Chinese restaurants in Khartoum. Finally a bus came and we were shuttled to a new building to wait.

At the new building a guard took my passport and itinerary. They were apparently passed it onto the gate people- who only exist in theory at this point because there is no one at
the gate since the flight was delayed by hours. I am assuming that this will be a situation similar to the waiting in the 'transit' area - that there is a system and I don't know it. It is certainly not in Egypt's best interest to take the passports of foreigners and not return them. A bunch of passportless cranky people stuck in the airport would not be a good situation.

Flying into Cairo was cool. Gray sky - it may be smog? and brown flat earth, no trees or hills or anything to distinguish it. And then a clump of uniform square apartment buildings the same color as the earth - think like cubical project boxes but each with maybe 20 units? And then there'd be just flat again and then a few clusters, not connected, of the same apartment boxes.