Well it didn't work out as I had hoped. I had gone to the bus station and gotten information suggesting that I could catch a bus to the airport every hour on the hour, even through the night. So I got up at four in the morning and headed back down there with all my stuff. One thing I noticed was that taxi drivers were driving right past me and not even attempting to try and get me as a fare. Perhaps things are quite as bad as the situation is made out to be.
I got to the bus station and sat down to wait. The bus was supposed tom come at about five. I was there at about 4:30. So I had a good long wait ahead of me. The worrying thing was that there was nobody else there. Then finally at about ten to five another man with a big suitcase came along. I figured for sure he was going to the airport. That was very encouraging. Five o'clock came with no bus. Five fifteen. No bus. Five twenty. No bus. At five thirty people started coming to open the ticket office, but still no bus. Finally, at five forty, I went over and asked when the bus was going to come. Six o'clock, I was told. That meant that I had been given the wrong information. Now I had to make decisions. Should I wait for the bus, or should I hail a dreaded taxi? I finally got the next question asked in the correct way so that the man understood. What time would the bus get to the airport? Seven o'clock. That finished it. I wasn't willing to play chicken with the departure time. I left and got in a cab.
Initially the cabbie was unsure where I wanted to go. He stopped to find someone who spoke English and asked me where I wanted to go. I had asked him if he would go to the airport when I first got in. He said yes. I thought he understood. Then I asked how much. He pointed to the meter. So I thought he was going to take me on the meter. Then when he found the guy who spoke English and found out again that I wanted to go to the airport, he turned off the meter. Damn cabbies!!!! He asked me what I was going to pay him. Shouldn't it be the other way around? How much did he want? I was in a hurry by now and so I just told him I had 50 pounds. That ought to have made him glint with joy because I am fairly certain that the metered fare would be far less. He accepted immediately, which just suggested that it would indeed have been much cheaper on the meter. Damn cabbies!!!!
But I was ready to be done with the whole sordid country. I just swallowed my annoyance and sat back for the ride. He drove a bit like a maniac. If I was worried about getting there in time, I needn't have. The only wrinkle was which terminal, which is what I was asked by the guy who spoke English. I didn't know. How am I supposed to know which terminal I am going to be leaving from?
Well the cabbie took me to terminal 3. And just before we got there, he asked me for 5 pounds for the parking fee. EFFING CABBIES!!! I really hate the lot of them. Well, I wasn't about to give him that money. He got a handsome sum for taking me to the airport and it's his problem to pay for parking. And to top it all off, I got out at terminal 3 and he left. Then I found out that I needed to be at terminal 1. EFFING, EFFING, TRIPLE EFFING, DOUBLE EFFING, EFFING, EFFING CABBIES!!!
Well, it did no good to be annoyed with the twit now. I had to get to terminal 1. I knew there was shuttle bus to go between the terminals, so I walked out to the curb to wait for it. I had plenty of time because the twit cabbie was also a maniac driver and it had only taken about 20 minutes to get to the airport. But as I hit the curb, first one, then another different “special” cabbie approached me. Did I want to go to terminal 1? At this time of day (6 am) it was iffy. If I had lots of time, it would be all right, but I might want to avail myself of their services to get to terminal 1 quickly. It would only be 5 dollars. Not 5 pounds, dollars. Or 30 pounds. I just laughed at the first one. And I told him that that was ridiculous. And even if it wasn't, I didn't have the money anyway to pay that. He looked at me hopefully and asked again, “Not even 5 dollars?” No. And I'm going to wait for the shuttle.
The second guy was just sleazy, even though he was well-dressed. He was once of those oily types that just oozes up to you with a slick spin on things. And he made the same offer. And I told him the same thing. It was too much and I didn't have the money anyway, so it was moot. But he wouldn't let go. He told me it wasn't too much, that this was a premium service he was offering, and I didn't know what it was worth. Then I started getting annoyed. It didn't help that I had only had about 4 hours sleep. It didn't help that I had spent more than two weeks dealing with these shady types who thought they were more worth more than they really were simply because I come from a “rich” country. It didn't help that I had just had the cabbie ask me for parking money after agreeing to a princely sum to take me to the airport. So I laid into the guy. I ended up telling him to leave me alone and stop hassling me and people who were just trying to get the hell out of the country and away from people like him who were giving Egypt a bad name. I think there was another foreigner there and may have found the exchange quite amusing. I wasn't sure because the shuttle that the first guy told me might come in about 40 minutes, showed up after about 3 (EFFING, EFFING, DOUBLE EFFING, DAMN DOUBLE DUTCH EFFING LYING CABBIES!!!!). I got on and left them behind. The shuttle went to the bus stand, and stopped. I had to transfer to the next shuttle in the queue and wait for about ten minutes before it headed off to terminal 1, where I arrived with still lots and lots of time to spare.
I followed a couple of guys in who had been latched onto by “helpers,” (but you can think of them more as leeches or some equally disgusting slimy bits of low life that hang around looking for a free ride) who helped them get their bags into the terminal. As I passed by them, I heard one of the slime molds start pestering the guys for baksheesh (tips). I don't know what happened, but they should be very, very glad they hadn't tried to help me. They would have been searching for their strips of skin that my scathing rebuke would have taken from their hides.
I went to the information desk to find out where to check in. Then I headed for the security scanner gate in front of the check in area. And I was latched onto by another of the leeches. He attempted to help me to the scanner and help me get my bags onto the scanner belt. Then he asked me for a tip. I just looked at him. I felt like laughing in his face and asking, “For what?” But I'm quite sure that would have been a waste of effort and breath. So I just told him no and walked through the metal detector to safety.
The rest of the airport stuff was fairly easy. I checked in and it took all of about 8 minutes. Then I went to the immigration station and was through there in about 7 minutes. Then I was to the gate area. I still had lots more than an hour before the flight. I could really have taken the bus I guess. But I just didn't want to play chicken with that departure time. I really had had enough of Egypt with it's money grubbing hand out for hand-outs. And after only one day, 12 hours really, back in Cairo, I really missed the nice people from the delta of only the day before. Sigh!!
The flight to Jordan was fairly uneventful, except for the guy seated next to me. I guess he just hadn't flown that much. But I would think the whole prohibition against cell phone use is loud enough and often enough for anyone to know. But as we were landing, he was trying to phone someone on the ground. I really wish I was the type of person who stares at a bozo like that long and hard until they get uncomfortable. Or someone who just tells them to desist as they are risking my life with their unbelievable stupidity. But I'm not. And I didn't. I just thought it silently to myself.
The second flight, from Jordan to Frankfurt, was awful. In the seat in front of me there was a baby that was being a baby, crying fairly often. That's not too bad. Babies do that and there is a timbre to such a baby's crying that isn't all that cringe-worthy. But there was another child with its mother in the seats beside me. And he was just being bad because he wanted to be. He played with the seat tray. It fell on his head, so he threw a tantrum. His mother fell asleep. He wanted attention, so he threw a tantrum. He threw lots of tantrums, and it often included a high-pitched scream. He threw stuff around, some of which landed on me. And this was regular behaviour throughout the four hour flight. Again, I wished I was the type of person to say something to the mother. Or to call the staff and ask that I be moved so as to preserve my sanity. But I'm not. And nobody did anything. Not the staff. Not the mother. Not me. And despite the in-flight entertainment system that included lots of movies and television programs, I couldn't really watch any of it because I had no earphones and when I asked about them, I was ignored. It was the worst flight I have taken in a long time.
But in the end, it was over. I arrived in Frankfurt and cleared customs without so much as a paperclip glitch. A quick stamp in the passport and I was in Germany officially.
Then I got my bag and went out to meet my friend. The main reason for coming to Frankfurt is my former nurse in the back clinic I was attending. Eunji worked there at the time, but shortly after I left Korea, she decided she needed a big change and applied to be a flight attendant. Her application was accepted by Lufthansa and she moved to Germany to take the training and start her new job. She kind of pooh-poohed the idea that I thought that was brave. But having done something like that myself when I went to work in Korea, I think differently. Very brave, Eunji!!
When I told I would come for a visit, as I was passing this way, she said she would meet me at the airport. And when I walked out of the customs and immigration area, she was there waiting. She was a sight for sore eyes, I'll tell you. After the horrible flight, after months of not seeing anyone that I knew beforehand, after all the hassles of travelling on my own and figuring it all out on my own, and the time in Egypt where even when I paid a fair amount of money to not be hassled, to still have hassles, I came out of the airport and had someone there to meet me and get me even a little bit oriented to the where I had arrived. That was soooo nice.
Unfortunately, Frankfurt is having some kind of trade fair at the moment and it's quite large. And in the true spirit of taking advantage of such an opportunity to truly rip people off, all the accommodation in the city is three and four times as expensive as at other times. Expensive at the best of times, it really is too expensive for me. In addition, Eunji is leaving for her run to Korea in a couple of days, and will be gone for four days. By the time she gets back the trade show will be finished and accommodation will be back to merely quite expensive, instead of ridiculously and prohibitively expensive. So we decided that I should go somewhere else for a few days and come back. Eunji will be back from Korea, and we can spend a day or two exploring the city and catching up. So we went to the train ticket office and I bought a ticket for Berlin. This is going to be another expensive period. Hopefully it won't as expensive as Egypt, though.
She bought me a pretzel, and a sausage. (Ah! Good western food again, and good German food to boot.) Then we took a walk to the river. It was dark, but the city still seemed quite pretty.
Then we went back to the train station and I got on my train. I'd be off to Berlin, and maybe another spot as well, for five days and then return to meet Eunji again for a couple of days before heading into France and then England and then home.
Thanks for being there, Eunji!!!
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