Egypt Day 1: Departure

Three-thirty is not a time in the morning to wake up.  The body rejects the reality of the situation.  The mind reels with semi-conscious fury demanding to know why it is being punished.  It is the time we must rise in order to make our first flight.   Besides some check-in shenanigans, the flight to Dallas is uneventful.

As we are waiting to disembark our plane at the Dallas airport Dawn consults her mental knowledge-base of airport creature comforts and announces that we are arriving at the terminal which is as far as it can possibly be from the terminal we need to depart from.  Additionally, she adds that when we exit the plane we will be very close to both a massage place and a Dunkin’ Donuts.  I don't know if her gift is astounding or sad.   

We have a few hours to kill waiting for our flight to Dubai which we spend in the international terminal.  Dawn threatens to maul a kid and I ask her to behave herself.  She counters that the international terminal is just like international waters and no laws apply here.  She can do whatever she wants.  To support her claim she points to the Duty Free store and says "see you don't have to pay taxes in international water or terminals."

As we wile away our time I decide that traveling with opened-toe shoes is a transgression of propriety and the perpetrators of this travel crime should feel deep and abiding shame.  I'm sure they don't, but they should.  Sure enough the passenger that sat next to Dawn on the 15 1/2 hour flight was wearing opened-toe shoes and it was all of 30 minutes before she curled up with her bare feet on the seats.  Wrong wrong wrong.  Although, to her credit, other than being a shoe-less travel criminal she was pretty much the ideal 15 1/2 hour airplane companion.

I find it so very odd that the restaurant we ate in the international terminal of Dallas gave us metal forks, metal spoons, and a plastic (although silver colored) knives.  I think they over estimate the threatening power of a butter knife.  The fork is much more menacing.  I’m sure there were a hundred more dangerous things on sale in the terminal gift shops, but such is the mania of the appearance of airplane safety.  Their frivolous safety gesture was all for naught though because Air Emirates arms all diners in the air with honest-to-god metal butter knifes.  I heft the forbidden silverware in my hand and try to let the surge of raw destructive power go to my head.

I've only had one or two 30 minute cat naps in the last 24 hours.  I'm feeling the effects.  My head is pounding and my brain feels like it's unspooling.  Stringing coherent thoughts together is becoming a struggle.  One more flight to go and who knows how many more hours before a proper shower and rest.  I have no idea where I'll be sleeping tonight, but I assure you - it will be the most comfortable bed I've ever encountered.  

انطلق

This time we’re heading to Egypt to visit my grandparents and do some sightseeing. Most of my recent knowledge of Egypt is gleaned from Penn & Teller and Anthony Bourdain. And yet I still want to visit pyramids and camels. Maybe even eat camels if the opportunity arises. Egypt is in the news quite a bit for something or another these days – I assume that something is negative because good news isn’t news and I have gotten such interesting looks from anyone who hears that’s where I’m heading. My response has uniformly been that if my grandparents can handle living there for a year, surely I’ll be fine for a week. Never mind that my grandfather is a retired Marine who has lived all over the world and my life can be described as devoted to avoiding exercise and sunshine.

In planning this trip, I did an excellent job early on, assuring we got our passports renewed (they expired 2 weeks too soon for the entry requirements), checking that the length of our stay didn’t require any special paperwork or shots, that sort of thing. Then I procrastinated until all the good flights were gone or too expensive. Then I let a few more months pass, realized it was almost time to leave, and threw some tours together kind of at the last minute. So last minute that here I am in the Dubai airport waiting for our connection to Cairo and there’s still one tour I haven’t gotten confirmed. If this all works out, I’ll have a travel agent to recommend.

Travel tip for those of you who think Egypt is an intimidating destination: maybe a layover in Dubai isn’t for you. The flight path crosses the tip of Syria before running most of the length of Iraq and gets really close to the Iranian border. I didn’t have a camera handy to photograph the on screen flight path, which is unfortunate as it was nice to see a map of the Middle East in the context of something other than war coverage.

(Also, a little travel tip for total strangers standing in line at the AA self check-in kiosks in Huntsville at five o’-fucking-clock in the morning: if the kiosk has a giant warning message with an exclamation mark on it that says wait for an attendant and other patrons are standing at it patiently waiting for an attendant, don’t stick your credit card in it to see if you can fix it. YOU ARE NOT HELPING, ASSHOLE. You are just making my morning longer. Asshole)

We don’t have a long enough layover to actually go into Dubai so it will remain, like Dallas, Dublin, and other destinations starting with D, a place I only know through its airport. One more flight and we’re meeting my grandparents in Cairo.