While being driven to a Cairo hotel I shuffled currency and selected hard notes - dollars or quids - to cover the pre-stated fare, with a decent tip. I was sharing the taxi with another British creature, a 'man', who was catching the same plane. He too shuffled money and selected his share of the fare. As we arrived he said he would pay and I foolishly gave him my share of the money. "They take advantage if you let them,' he remarked smugly.
Smirking, the piece of Scheisse handed all the money to the massive, splendidly uniformed doorman of the hotel, and I heard the taxi driver wailing in despair as my British companion bounced up the steps into the hotel. I didn't have time or money or a free hand to redress the situation.
Later, to my distaste, this guy turned out to be on the return plane to London, came and sat in the next seat and said hello. I got up silently and moved to another seat as far from the carphound as possible.
Some people are very badly brought up. No wonder foreigners sometimes think poorly of us.
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I thought you were describing a woman of ill repute.
A few years back I did a gig in Lagos, and was staying at the Meridian.
Now, remember, I speak very home counties.
Was approached at the outside bar by some Saffer who spun a tale of woe, and how his SA IT company (a big name) had let him down, he was working with Standard Bank etc etc etc, and how he needed a few thousand nairas and everything would be paid back etc etc etc.
He spun on for a while, and eventually I said to him, in Afrikaans, that he could go and perform an unnatural act upon himself.
He'd assumed I was a Brit visitor.
Upon relating the tale to an associate in Cape Town, he remarked 'SH** attracts flies."
Sums it up, really.
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The basic Egyptian currency in my day was the piastre. At some point in its history it had been equivalent to a shilling, and taxi drivers, hotel staff and so on who recognized an English accent or demeanour would refer to it as a 'bob', or if a 20 or 25 piastre note as a 'quid'. This was friendly of them and made one feel at home, up to a point.
Among my collection of dog-eared foreign banknotes are two bearing the figure 200, but the unit isn't given in English so unless you read Arabic or Sanskrit or whatever you are in the dark. Can't remember where they came from or what they are worth. Certainly won't be much I can't help feeling. They are blue in colour.
The somewhat Stalinist Mozambican government was very pernickety about foreigners having the currency. I think there was paranoia about the possibility of massive large-scale forgery undermining the economy, such as it was. Visitors in possession of hard currency had to shop in Soviet-style special foreigners' shops where you could get soap and razor blades, otherwise rare and hard to find. The change came in a multi-currency cocktail and it was impossible for a foreigner to make out what it was worth. I've still got US dollars, SA rands, an Aussie dollar and all the rest in my currency bowl.
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Ian, so did I! Must have a mucky mind, and I'm not even going to google 'Cairo snatch' just in case
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....you wanna buy postcard?.........
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LOL I did and I don't have Safesearch turned on. Most text answers were about incidents involving gunmen and the only notable image was of an Egyptian lady lifting weights.
I clicked through to see the article, which was from the Cairo Post and was headlined "Egyptian girl planning to be weightlifting champion does 4-finger pushups".
Do they have KitKats in Egypt then? :-)
(It's here if you don't believe me, and is safe for work etc!! tinyurl.com/grvjamm)
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>>an Egyptian lady lifting weights.
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Indeed.
Much sniggering at the Olympics when commentators say 'you should see her snatch'.
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Cairo snatch - Ian (Cape Town)
