Starting at 8.30, we got up to get ready for our visa extension in Egypt. Having got up late and needing to be at the office at 9am, we left the hotel without breakfast (a terrible error, as we realized later!) for the visa extension office a couple of hundred meters away from our hotel. Some minutes later, having arrived at the office after cycling through a nice, lovely and peaceful morning traffic in El Kharga, we enter the office. The policeman first checks our passports. Then a clerk tries to figure out what we want. Fortunately we have the telephone number of Mr. Mohsen, running the tourist office in town. We set up a connection and the phone wanders between Yann and the clerk until we agree on the duration of extension of our visa and the price to be paid. "Fabulous, that was easy", we think. No, no, you need a photocopy of your passport and a passport photo. So off we ride on our bicycles: first to the tourist office to make some photocopies (don't miss the Chaï!), second back to the hotel to get the passport photos!
Back in the office, we need to fill out 3 forms.
Now, all paperwork is done. We have paid the fee. We wait. We wait. And we wait. At a about 11.30 we receive our visa extension and leave for our breakfast.
We heard, there is an excellent pizza place in town. Off we ride on our bicycles to find it. It's open and the pizzas are good. Although another 1/2h passes waiting with our mouths dripping thinking of the food we will soon have...
Next we go shopping for the remaining 300 km to the Nile Valley. Oranges, aubergines, onions, garlic, ...
The bread shopping is worth mentioning: coming back from the old town, we pass a bakery (some black dark hole where a lot of men come out of, carrying fresh pita bread so hot they have to let it cool down on a wooden grid just outside the bakery). It's Yann's job to get the bread. So I directly go to the wooden grid (where everyone is letting cool down his own bread) thinking that's the place to pick up the bread from and start counting my 10 pita breads. A man points out to the breads I am having in my hands and tells me these are his. "Well, I don't mind to take the ones beside", I think and hand him over the 9 breads I have in my hands and start picking up the other breads. The man stares at me as if I was from another planet! (I still don't get it!). Finally, another man pities me and takes me by the arm and ushers me into the bakery where you actually buy the bread. I am ushered to the front where I buy my 10 pita breads and quickly leave, starting to understand what my behaviour just communicated: I have no clue how things function here!!!
Let's face it:
1 - tourist behave strangely and sometime really with a lot of stupidity. "Not bad we are moving on", we think!
2 - Egyptian people have a lot of patience with us, the tourists! Shukran!
Then dessert awaits us with a Nutella Crêpe and finally we savour a nice turkish coffee.
It's 4pm and we are exhausted of our day.
Let's rest at the hotel!
(PS: due to a slow internet connection, photos are going to be loaded later)
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