Our return flight from Nairobi to Seattle is, as they say, indirect. Sure, no plane leaving Nairobi will travel directly to Seattle without stopping, but our itinerary is quite jumpy, shall we say.

I type these words in the Cairo airport, while the boss enjoys a chai in Starbucks. We investigated the American Lounge, but decided against it due to the $20 entry fee and the availability of comfy couches in the Starbucks lounge. Considering the time, 12:30 AM, I'm not necessarily surprised to see people ordering drinks and food from the establishments in the food court. It looks all so American, actually: McDonald's, Cinnabon, and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. The architecture and components of the roof in the transit terminal remind me of London Heathrow.

In another time and place earlier today (yesterday, actually), we arrived at the Nairobi airport plenty early, which meant we paced the curved hall lined with repeating duty free shops. Window shopping down the hall felt like walking through some mirrored fun house: I never knew if we were at the start or end or middle of the gauntlet because the curios, candy, and perfume for sale was all the same from one shop to the next. Before reaching the land of plenty, however, we ran the screening gauntlet (minimal), only to perform the same procedure again at the gate to earn the privilege of biding our time in the waiting area. We stood knowing we'd be sitting for several hours on the plane.

I've been to Sudan! Sort of. We stopped in Khartoum to unload and load passengers on the way to Cairo from Nairobi. I saw there, parked at another gate, a United Nations airplane. Now that is unusual.

Exciting times at the Cairo airport when a gate agent (not his real title, I'm sure) walked the half dozen or so transit passengers to a security gate and had it out, verbally, with a security guard and, who we found out later to be, a bus driver. Since the bout took place in Arabic, I'm surmising at the content of the joust: the gate agent wanted to get passengers connecting on a tight flight to their new gate, the bus driver complained they needed to be screened, and the security guard landed his blow that he needed to process documents. In the end, for whatever reason, the gate agent had his way.

The agent then took our passports and boarding passes, asked us to sit in a small waiting room, and performed some unknown machinations with them. A rather large ledger (or three) on the counter may have been updated somehow with our travel information. Once the secret check ended, we boarded a transport bus to the terminal in which we now wait. The same procedure with the passports/boarding passes (and yet another "detailed" screening of our bags) transpired in our new location (more ledgers on the desk, in Arabic).

Locations