Welcome to Egypt

After a five hour wait in the rather otherworldly airport in United Arab Emirate of Sharjah, I finally got on the plane bound for Alexandria in Egypt. The three hour flight was relatively uneventful, which in this region basically means no bombs went off, but the excitement started before we touched terra firma.
As we descended in to Alexandria, the "Fasten Seatbelts" light having been switched on ten minutes earlier, the plane did a few tight circles around the city and out over the Mediterranean sea, and about halfway through the second loop, almost close enough to the ground to reach out the window and touch the tops of the trees one passenger decided that he need to go to the toilet, so he stood up and started walking down the aisle. He almost made it to the toilet before the hostesses, who were strapped in to their seats noticed that he was wandering about and immediately started yelling at him, in person and over the loud hailer, to immediately return to his seat - you didn't have to speak Arabic to understand what they were saying.
Not long after we touched down, and about five seconds after we rolling on the plane's wheels rather then flying, still moving at quite a speed, three or four passengers stood up and started getting their luggage out of the overhead lockers, as if we were sitting still on the tarmac waiting to taxi on to the runway for take-off, when in fact we were hurtling along at high speed straining to slow down in time to not run off the end of the runway. The hostess again yelled them down, and eventually after a bit of back and forth everyone sat down. However this champing at the bit to get the jump over everyone else and be the first off the plane, caused a repeat of these events twice more before we actually came to a stop - by which time the hostess had pretty much given up their efforts, people were wandering about and even the Egyptian guy sitting next to me was shaking his head in dismay at the rather risky behaviour of our fellow passengers.
The complete stupidity of standing up on a fast moving plane was only underscored by the events that followed next - not only did all of the passengers have to wait for the transfer buses to fill up before anybody made it any where near the terminal, once inside it took at least an hour to make it through immigration. The arrivals hall was a linoleum floored, fluorescent lit room not much bigger than a class room, into which three aeroplanes worth of people crammed into, in what suspiciously looked like queues but functioned more like an NGO donating food to the starving operation. Whilst the majority of people accepted their status as equals and waited in lines, quite a number of people simply wandered past the queues along the side, thinking no doubt they were more important than anyone else, and then tried to insinuate their way in front by either catching the eye of some one they knew amongst the myriad of uniformed people who had something to do with immigration, surreptitiously drifting in to the front of the queue, or simply waving their passport around and asserting their importance. As I watched people for twenty minutes or show I saw the complete lack of any sense of order in the waiting, people would wander out of the queue, end up in arguments when they tried to sneak in closer to the front, be sent in to exile at the side for a while then rejoin at the back of the line. Despite the raised voices, lack of clean air, the early hours and lack of sleep, everyone seemed to be in relatively polite and good humoured. I got the feeling that this sort of queuing, chaos and inefficiency was common rather than exceptional.
Meanwhile the three narrow wooden booths which actually housed the immigration officials were completely surrounded in what can only be described as a shamozel. For some reason the process required that you hand your passport to the guy through the front window, then walk past the booth and wait around until your name was called out whereupon you fought through the waiting throng, collected your passport, had it checked by the guard on the door, and then got to collect your luggage. All this occurred in a classroom sized room, now filled with cigarette smoke and most men had lit up a fag and felt free to blow smoke in anyone's face.
I had managed to avoid the queue because as I walked in the door I was accosted by the waiting health officials who asked me whether I had any flu like symptoms, then took down my name and hotel details just in case. I had then waited for the Bank de Eigypt counter to open to purchase my visa for twenty minutes or so, but to no avail. I then had to push my way through the queue, just to get around the back of immigration officials, surrender my passport to the door man, walk across the luggage hall to the bank/exchange counter on the other side, purchase my visa sticker (which uniquely in my experience they let me stick in to my passport myself) return through the door, collecting my passport on the way, push my way through the throng to the back to start waiting again.
Somehow I managed to finally make it to the front of queue before everybody made it through, although there was probably only a quarter of the people left from the peak surge. Reassuringly I noticed that there were still quite a few people from my flight waiting. When I made it to the window the guy behind me actually waved me ahead of him, and I handed over my passport without a hassle and went to wait with the others.
And as a reminder that even waiting in a stuffy queue for an hour and a half at 2.30 in the morning can have a happy ending, I had the pleasure of meeting, Michele, a great Italian bloke who was at the beginning of his adventure, riding his bicycle across the middle east. Misery certainly does breed company, and the arrivals hall was a great introduction to the pleasures of Egypt.