Accra to Cairo
It turns out that my coworker, who organized the event, has had her laptop stolen on the last day. It’s a short day, because we end on Thursday at lunch. Late lunch, because the finishing open Q&A session starts late and runs long (for which we’re happy - always good to have a lot of engagement from the participants). And it appears that during the lunch break, in fact, just after the moment we were supposed to leave the conference room (according to the modified schedule hotel staff had been informed of only an hour earlier so they could delay lunch), a middle-aged local dressed “business casual” drove up to the hotel in a taxi (which waited for him), came in, went straight to the conference room, turned around when he realized people were still in it, then came back a few minutes later when it was empty, spent four minutes in it and then went back to the taxi and drove off.
I know this because I get roped into looking at the surveillance tapes from the hotel security service later that evening, which with all the frame advancing and attempts to magnify screenshots is starkly reminiscent of a CSI episode. The timing seems to suggest some degree of collusion by hotel staff, police was apparently less than enthusiastic to even take a complaint, I’m told, only moving on this issue once my coworker had escalated this to something like the local superintendent by throwing big words around (like “World Bank”, “Security Breach”, and possibly “Diplomatic Incident” - I wasn’t there). I don’t remember why I’d packed my laptop this time when I usually left it in the (supposedly locked!) conference room over lunch, but am happy I did. And spend the rest of the day (week, really) more security conscious than previously.
I leave Accra late in the evening. All the planes leaving this evening (at least four of them that I am aware of) are scheduled to leave at the same time. Accra does *not* have four runways capable of operating at the same time, meaning that - by an obscure process of elimination - some (well, most) planes leave late. Mine is of course among them, although being a rational-minded person (or at least preferring to see myself as one) I am compelled to admit that with the majority of flights being late, one *should* expect one’s own to be among them, rather than feeling singled out for punishment by a hostile universe. That doesn’t make the time spent waiting in the boarding area pass any faster or less tedious. It’s aggravated by the thought that if they’d given a proper time (or could at least have told us by, say, 2300 that it wouldn’t leave until 0030) I could have spent the time in a comfortable seat with internet access in the business lounge (which Kotoka airport supposedly does have). So instead I sit around with headphones in my ear, taking them out every time there’s an announcement, though they are invariably not just heavily accented but also garbled by an ancient speaker system so that I need not have bothered.
The trip to Cairo passes in a blur. I do not recall the stopover landing in Lagos (Nigeria) at all - I wake up on the descent to Cairo convinced that I slept through it. Which is odd, given that I reclined my seat as much as possible when going to sleep and had it similarly reclined when I woke up - but I am certain that this wasn’t the one flight in which the cabin attendants let people sleep through a landing and start. So at some time in between, I must have been awake (enough) to bring up the backrest of the seat for the landing in Lagos, and have put it back down after the start from there. With no recollection of it whatsoever only a few hours later. Scary, really. Guess I didn’t get enough sleep earlier. And this night didn’t help.
But I prefer to focus on the here and now. It occurs to me that as we approach Cairo from Nigeria, that is from the Southwest, and the pyramids of Giza are Southwest of the city center (with the airport to the Northeast), they might be visible from the airplane as we descend. I look out and - sure enough, there they are. Wow.
I know this because I get roped into looking at the surveillance tapes from the hotel security service later that evening, which with all the frame advancing and attempts to magnify screenshots is starkly reminiscent of a CSI episode. The timing seems to suggest some degree of collusion by hotel staff, police was apparently less than enthusiastic to even take a complaint, I’m told, only moving on this issue once my coworker had escalated this to something like the local superintendent by throwing big words around (like “World Bank”, “Security Breach”, and possibly “Diplomatic Incident” - I wasn’t there). I don’t remember why I’d packed my laptop this time when I usually left it in the (supposedly locked!) conference room over lunch, but am happy I did. And spend the rest of the day (week, really) more security conscious than previously.
I leave Accra late in the evening. All the planes leaving this evening (at least four of them that I am aware of) are scheduled to leave at the same time. Accra does *not* have four runways capable of operating at the same time, meaning that - by an obscure process of elimination - some (well, most) planes leave late. Mine is of course among them, although being a rational-minded person (or at least preferring to see myself as one) I am compelled to admit that with the majority of flights being late, one *should* expect one’s own to be among them, rather than feeling singled out for punishment by a hostile universe. That doesn’t make the time spent waiting in the boarding area pass any faster or less tedious. It’s aggravated by the thought that if they’d given a proper time (or could at least have told us by, say, 2300 that it wouldn’t leave until 0030) I could have spent the time in a comfortable seat with internet access in the business lounge (which Kotoka airport supposedly does have). So instead I sit around with headphones in my ear, taking them out every time there’s an announcement, though they are invariably not just heavily accented but also garbled by an ancient speaker system so that I need not have bothered.
The trip to Cairo passes in a blur. I do not recall the stopover landing in Lagos (Nigeria) at all - I wake up on the descent to Cairo convinced that I slept through it. Which is odd, given that I reclined my seat as much as possible when going to sleep and had it similarly reclined when I woke up - but I am certain that this wasn’t the one flight in which the cabin attendants let people sleep through a landing and start. So at some time in between, I must have been awake (enough) to bring up the backrest of the seat for the landing in Lagos, and have put it back down after the start from there. With no recollection of it whatsoever only a few hours later. Scary, really. Guess I didn’t get enough sleep earlier. And this night didn’t help.
But I prefer to focus on the here and now. It occurs to me that as we approach Cairo from Nigeria, that is from the Southwest, and the pyramids of Giza are Southwest of the city center (with the airport to the Northeast), they might be visible from the airplane as we descend. I look out and - sure enough, there they are. Wow.