It seems that flights in and out of Cairo are at rather inconvenient times. Our flight to Morocco left at 00:35 on Monday morning. Apparently, this is quite normal.
We were on a bus tour run by the Student Housing department and run by 2 of the RA’s from the dorms. They did a pretty good job of working with what they had.
Unfortunately, the Student Housing office used a tour guide that, imho, should not be used again. I shall call him Mr SlimeySalesman. More about that later.
Anyway, a bus was waiting for us at around 9:30 in front of the hostel. We were the only “adults” on the bus, though there were 5 or 6 other adults on the trip, but they met the tour at the airport.
Looking around, I asked one of the organizers if we could get a discount as chaperones.
We climbed on the bus and were on our way.
The flight was less than optimal:
we flew a red-eye from Cairo->Barcelona->Madrid.
While in Barcelona, we had a very long delay. It seems that there had been a screw up with the plane tickets (see comment about tour guide.) There was one ticket that had the passenger get off the plane in Barcelona, instead of Madrid.
The tour guide “fixed” this problem by switching tickets with a few people. So now an american college student was travelling as “Mohammed somebodyorother”, one other male student was traveling with a woman’s ticket (“The spanish airline won’t be able to tell that the arabic name is female”) and the tour guide took the ticket that had Barcelona as its destination.
Mr SlimeySalesman got off the plane in Barcelona, along with his wife. His luggage stayed on the plane. His wife wasn’t supposed to get off the plane. Her ticket went through to Madrid (and then casablanca).
Think about that for a moment:
Here we are, on the ground in Barcelona. Coming from Egypt. An Arab decides to get off the plane at an unplanned stop and leave his luggage on the plane. Hmm.
This triggered a full security search of the plane. They went through all the overhead compartments and pulled out each piece of luggage and asked who it belonged to.
One poor woman was asleep in the back row of the plane. When they pulled her bag out, no one claimed it. (The stewardess and/or security people really should have wakened everybody..) They took it off the plane. It had her money, camera, all her clothes etc. She awoke in Madrid with no luggage. She is a well traveled person and never checks luggage “cause they loose checked luggage.” sigh.
The stewardesses also verified each passenger against the list. Or tried to. This was hampered by the fact that the minute people got on the plane in Cairo, just about everybody switched seats for one reason or another.
They didn’t ask for ID or anything, but they went down the aisles trying to match names with the list. This caused a rather long delay. It was compounded by the fact that the woman didn’t use a pen to mark off who she already verified. She spent 30 minutes going back and forth in the last 10 rows or so of the plane. Idiota!
Finally another stewardess, who, in the time the first stewardess had been trying to resolve 10 rows, had verified all the way from the front back to us (row 25) gave her a pen and told her what to do. A (rather dim) lightbulb went off and she finished the verification.
We left Barcelona about 1.5 hours late.
“Luckily” we had a nice long layover in Madrid.
We used that time to buy some Jamon Bocadillo’s (serrano ham and manchego cheese sandwhiches on a crusty baguette. One of our favorite simple foods from our trip to Spain several years ago.) and a mini bottle of red wine. mmm, spanish red wine.
The flight from Madrid to Casablanca was relatively uneventful, but rather bumpy. We were in Morocco. Time to collect the luggage and get on the bus.
We waited awhile for the woman who “lost” her carryon to file a claim with the airport and for the travel agent to arrive on his flight (about 20minutes) and we were off for our hotel.
Oof.