A ten hour flight, delayed for takeoff allowed me to connect with Alex and Maria; we were the only “Americans” on the trip. I have a feeling we may travel with Anayra again 😉
The colorful re-construction was jarring on the ride in from the airport. Quoting from Gilles Khoury, whose Financial Times article coincided with my trip, “The condition of Egypt into a few words – its perennial hardships and rises and falls since the 2011 revolution that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak…. summarised the way people feel and behave here, with more or less similarities: their emotional exhilarations, their cautious hope and, of course, the lightness, the comic relief, the forever joie de vivre, which they express with the term maalesh (“It’s fine”).”
We were all exceptionally exhausted, but the meal, location and instant connections made at the table on the first night, clearly set the stage for the rest of the trip.
Interestingly enough, I captured shots of two wedding preps while lounging at the pools…in two different hotels….at both the start and the end of the trip. And as it turns out, the bearded guy (shooting the image out the window in seat 30A) was again my seat mate, on the way back to NY. 😉
