Greek Complexity

Amsterdam Day 1

I went on a short holiday in Europe a couple of weeks ago so the next few posts are going to be a mini-travelogue. For various reasons, I'm gonna pretend that I'm live-blogging on each day as the action happens.

---

At Changi airport and, unbelievably, I'm writing work emails at 11pm till the very last minute before I need to run to my boarding gate. Thank goodness for free Internet access.

On the plane and get my first impressions of the Dutch (not that I've never met Dutch people before):

• They all follow instructions (unlike Indians!). The man next to me shifts uncomfortably when he sees me tapping away on my phone keyboard even after the safety video has ended. In my defence, I had turned off the radio!
• Even the kids are disciplined. Even though it was a 13-hour flight, not once was I disturbed by a tantrum thrown by a petulant midget. The closest I came to being disturbed by a Little Person was when the 8-year old behind me kicked my seat back a couple of times. Don't think that was deliberate.
• Yet they're not mute and quite willing to speak up (unlike Singaporeans!) or lend a hand when necessary, as happened a few times when a harried steward tried to find an empty overhead bin for someone's bag. Never seen that happen on flights around Asia.

On the whole, a very civilised lot.

---

One horrible moment on the plane when I thought I'd forgotten my camera! I usually forget to pack something or the other. This trip went without a hitch.

Watched L'age de Raison (The Age of Reason) on the in-flight video. Very nice in parts but only 3.5 stars.

The flight announcements are made in English by a stewardess as usual, followed by a taped Dutch version. Why don't they do this for all flights? Flights to India, China, Germany and Japan, among others, always have stewardesses make the announcements in person in both English and the destination country's language. Why not tape them all including the English ones? Frees the stewardess to do whatever else needs to be done.

I want to go here

Maybe even live there. I dunno.

Joi Ito, you lucky, lucky ducky.

http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2010/03/16/puerto-viejo.html

Egypt: Day 3: "What was that again?"

We were met at Aswan station by a chap with a piece of paper with "Marcelo" on it. He took us to our hotel where we sat down to discuss the itinerary for the day and the following day.

"So you signed up for the tour package," he opened.

"Yes," we responded simply.

"Do you have a receipt?"

"What receipt?"

"Do you have this receipt?"

"No."

"You don't have this receipt?"

"No."

"What's he saying?"

"He's asking whether we have a receipt."

"Do you have it?"

"No. Do you?"

"No."

"We don't have a receipt."

"Ok, I think I understand. You don't have the receipt."

This crucial point having been established, he took us through our itinerary.

Egypt: Day 3: Relativity along the Nile

We'd been told that we'd arrive at Aswan at about seven in the morning. I woke continually during the night, nervous because I didn't know whether or not Aswan was the terminal station for our train. Occasionally, I would make the trek to my original car to check that Marcelo and Rafael were still on the train. I found Marcelo but saw no sign of Rafael, which puzzled me and helped little to abate my nervousness.

Around six-thirty am, I went to the door and asked a fellow passenger when Aswan would arrive.

"Uh. Twelve o'clock."

I wasn't sure she'd understood the question.

I turned to someone else and repeated the question in perfect English. Received a response in perfect Arabic. I moved to broken English and sign language. Still perfect Arabic. I smiled helplessly and moved off.

The conductor, glowering nearby, displayed no signs of wanting to help. He seemed petulant about the insufficiently handsome tip I had given him he had extracted from me for the privilege of being woken unbidden from a sound slumber.

Someone else affirmed that the train was late and Aswan would arrive perhaps at noon or one pm.

Alright, then. Back to bed.

Egypt: Day 3

I had a seat by myself on the train and although it was a night train, it wasn't a sleeper. I composed myself for an uncomfortable night and dozed off. Abruptly in the middle of the night, I was jerked awake and my bag was whisked away from under my legs. Bewildered, I looked up and found the conductor had done the whisking. He beckoned me urgently and I followed like a lamb, tottering half-asleep.

We made it to the next car where he plonked my bag down in an empty compartment. I now had a three-seater to myself and could stretch out properly. I proceeded to do so and promptly fell asleep.

Yet another jerk! This was getting annoying.

The conductor stood at the door with his companion. He was asking for baksheesh, the grand old Egyptian tradition of tipping, in return for finding me a better seat. For some reason, even though I could see no one else around, he seemed to find it necessary to whisper the demand and stick his hand out in spy-vs-spy fashion.

"Merry Christmas," he hissed.

It took a while for the clouds of sleep to clear from my addled brain. I handed him a note. He protested that there were two of them and that this was a terrific upgrade from my previous sleeping quarters.

I handed him another, smaller note. The protests continued.

"Look, buddy, I didn't ask you to wake me," I began. He didn't understand the words but I must have looked sulky.

He left and I returned to la-la-land.

Egypt: Day 2: "Very good driver!"

Returning to the hotel that evening, I packed up in preparation to go on a four-day package tour to Aswan and Luxor in the south of Egypt. Two other guys from the hotel, Brazilian engineering students on holiday from school in France, were to take the same tour. Rafael and Marcelo.

We were met by a taxi driver who was due to take us to the train station. He was in a mighty hurry, we knew not why. In a contraption that looked fit to ferry two in marginal discomfort, he forced the three of us into the back seat. The front seat lay empty, mocking us. As we stared at our knees in front of our noses, we made muffled conversation.

Our maniac driver suddenly stopped after having driven for fifteen minutes including a grand finale of driving in reverse for fifty metres the wrong way up a one-way street. Realisation dawned upon us: he was picking up someone else.

I looked back. Hold on. Two people?!

Miraculously, the little car had a big heart. We didn't bother with introductions. Saeed the driver kept performing acrobatic one-handed feats of driving with scant disregard for potential collisions. He punctuated the shocked silence with "Very good! Very good driver!" Nervous, helpless laughter from the rest of us.

Rafael had told me that he would be in India in February. When he commented now about Cairo's lack of traffic rules, I told him that Bombay would offer up the same medley of chaos and cacophony but with ten times as much traffic and a hundred times as many pedestrians. He was floored. I told him to get out of the city as soon as he landed.

Saeed dropped us off at the station, stuffing a ticket in each of our hands, and told us that someone would meet us at Aswan the next morning.

"Who?"

"Oh, don't worry, no problem. Some guy will call out Marcelo's name."

Egypt: Day 2: The celebrity Sphinx

This was my only truly touristy day in Egypt. I have one word for you: con-job. Egypt has some of the friendliest people I've ever met anywhere but one shouldn't assume that the friendliness is always truly natural. If you're anywhere near a tourist area, it's reasonable to assume the smiles are motivated by the prospect of money. (Away from the touristy areas, the helpfulness and smiles really are genuine.)

I had decided that my first visit would be to the pyramids. Naturally, the guys at my hotel offered to make all the arrangements. That seemed like a pretty good idea. All it actually meant was that I set myself up with the word Sucker tattooed to my forehead. Here's what I managed:

• Overpaid for the taxi that drove me to Giza, Saqqara and Dahshur. (The driver entreated me repeatedly to "give yourself to me," which would have been frightening if I didn't know that he simply meant I should trust him with the itinerary.)
• Overpaid for the horse and guide I hired in the Giza pyramid complex
• Overpaid for my lunch
• Overpaid for a papyrus painting
• ...

You get the idea!

It wasn't all bad, of course. The pyramids are truly magnificent and enough has been written about them by far more competent writers than me. Of the Sphinx, my travel book quotes Alan Bennett as saying, quite accurately, that "seeing the Sphinx is like meeting a TV personality in the flesh -- always smaller than had been imagined."

TIP: if you ever go to Egypt, don't take any packaged tours or make any other travel arrangements in advance if you can help it for the first couple of days. Not until you're familiar with the prices and the various scams, that is.

Egypt: Day 2: Cheap thrills

My hotel was little more than a backpacker's hostel, though that was no surprise considering the price I was paying and the reviews I'd read. I'm sure I enjoyed staying there more than I would have a 'proper' hotel, mostly because of its sociable, easygoing atmosphere, especially given that I was travelling alone.

Having said that, certain practical matters did have to be ascertained: bathroom! I found out that hot water was produced by quite an ingenious mechanism. In the bathroom, I found a gas cylinder connected to a small storage tank. When the tap was turned, the flame came on and hot water poured out. Very impressed! As long as the water flows and the cylinder has gas, one has hot water. No need to worry about power failures!

Egypt: Day 1

Well, not really. This is about how I got to Egypt not my first day there.

I thought I'd chronicle my holiday in Egypt this December so that I wouldn't forget. Also, these are backdated to the actual dates I'm writing about. Here goes.

So I only bought my ticket to Cairo five days in advance. Somehow, the dates never really struck me. And then having decided that I should probably do a little more by way of preparation besides deciding how I'd get there, I bought a Lonely Planet three days before my flight.

It struck me the next day that it might also be a good idea to book a hotel, if only for the first night. So a day before taking off, I called a-hotel-any-hotel and told them that I'd be arriving the following night and they should pick me up at the airport. It's always been my policy never to leave anything to the last minute.

I'd decided that I'd be doing this backpacker-style. Which meant, of course, that I needed to buy a backpack. Three hours before my flight, I introduced my backpack to my dear friends Higgledy and Piggledy. Which meant that I forgot to pack the number one most important thing that I'd been warned about. Passport? No. Tickets? E-tickets. Moolah? Uh-huh. Toilet paper. No matter, I thought on my way to the airport. How bad could it be? Surely I'd find toilet paper somewhere. Brave words. Asinine but brave. I blame my foolhardiness on the cough medicine I'd been doped up on for the past five days.

I arrived at the airport insanely early. I even had time to go to the loo. (I exaggerate. I also had time to drink some water.)

The flight was fairly uneventful. All I remember is watching a German movie called Vollidiot (4 stars out of 5) and racking my brains to recall on which previous flight I'd seen the flight attendant in my section of the plane. I was dead sure that I'd even had a conversation with her on some previous flight. On this flight, she looked like she wanted to yank someone's head off, throw it out a window and then take her time with the rest of the body. The sign above her head said Beware, I Bite and I bewore, lest she bit.

Ten hours, three movies, two meals and a nap later, I found myself in Cairo, where I was met at the gate by... no one. Hardly a surprise. After all, I'd only called the hotel twice from Singapore that day to remind them that I needed a pick-up.

Someone let me use his mobile phone to call the hotel. I was assured that the driver was less than five minutes away and would I please wait. An hour and ten minutes later, having gotten on first-name basis with every tour operator, tourist and tout within a thirty-yard radius, I was on my way to the hotel.

Where I made notes on all of the above before hitting the sack, finally ending with, "Room: a bed and... that's it. But what else do I need?"