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Meet Me in the Middle (East)

Saturday, December 17, 2005

A Word About Plane Tickets

In November a group of us decided to go to Cairo for New Year’s Eve. To this day I don’t exactly know how many people are going because there are a few dozen travel plans, all converging in Cairo in time for New Year’s Eve itself. Some people are taking a month to travel across southern Jordan, around the south of Egypt and back up to Cairo. Some are flying directly to Cairo. And some are opting for the inefficient but drastically cheaper method of traveling by bus to Aqaba, taking the ferry around the Sinai Peninsula, and then taking another bus to Cairo. All told it is projected to take about 21 hours, and will cost roughly half of the one-hour flight.

I have decided to go the ‘quick’ route and am flying on Dec.28th and am so excited, I mean little kid with ice cream in summer excited, about the pyramids. I mean, the PYRAMIDS. Need I say more? I’ll save it until I actually go and have a real description for you.

Cairo sounds like the NYC of the Middle East, no sleeping, crazy people trying to sell you things every step you take, intense traffic and a vibrant social scene. Should be interesting!

Getting our plane tickets was another ordeal entirely. You would think that the NATIONAL airline, the main carrier for a nation of 77.5 million people would have to be pretty efficient, or at least basically functional, but you would be sorely mistaken.

We reserved tickets on Egypt Air in mid-November and had until Dec. 22 to purchase them. So we took some time to research other deals and in the end, out of some mixture of frustration/acceptance/simplicity, decided we would just buy them. Rob had made the reservation, 180 JD each ($1 = .75 JD) but had since run off to play in the US for two weeks, so Justin and I were in charge of buying the tickets.

Justin called to confirm the tickets and discovered that it is impossible to purchase tickets over the phone. You have to physically go down to the Egypt Air office to buy the tickets. Now we live in Amman so this doesn’t sound like that big a deal but what about people in the rest of the country? And of course, nothing is ever so simple….

They said we should come in the next two days to buy the tickets (on a Thurs.) and to our surprise they actually were open on Friday (which is like Sunday here). Of course they were only open from 3:00 to 5:00 but ma fil moush kileh (not a problem).

We got to the office after a long, adventurous cab ride trying to find the office, including our cab driver stopping and getting out to ask for directions at several different locations. It was raining. This is the first day it has rained in about two months. The office was empty except for one man. Who told us that the tickets we reserved existed, but the price was now higher.

What is the point of the reservation?

We don’t know. He said it was related to gas prices, and that he could knock four JD off each ticket, but that was all he could do. So now we’re bartering for tickets?! What? How can he do that? No idea.

And then he added that, since it was Friday, we could only pay for the tickets in CASH.

Arguing was futile, though we tried for a while, then we walked around in the rain trying to find an ATM, and had to find three because the machines wouldn't let us take out enough money.

The flight we have is a great one, and I refuse to let this taint my enthusiasm about Egypt (have I mentioned PYRAMIDS!??!?!??!!!) The tickets are now in hand. And lesson learned. If you like the price. Buy the tickets! (And beware of state-run travel services.)

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