Sister Visit I
Merry Christmas!
In case it’s a little foggy (ahem), my speech bubbles are on the left and Moustafa’s are on the right.
This marks the first of a series of strips showing my sister’s Christmas visit to Egypt. Our whole trip will not be documented in comic form, but there are a few moments that were ‘comic worthy’. I’ll comment more on this particular situation in next week’s comic. Suffice to say that I had not seen fog like this in Alexandria until that day, go figure. I’m just glad I was not going home that morning like some of the foreign teachers did. And it had to happen on the first trip someone made to Egypt; I had bought Wendy a SIM card, but she obviously did not have it yet. She will be passing it off and I’ll put money on the account when someone comes so that we don’t have this situation again, but I didn’t have a non-$50-shipping way to pass it off to her to start with.
Because of Borg El Arab’s distance and remote location (the airport in Alex is closed for an indefinite time for renovations; it was supposed to reopen in 2014 but then the revolution happened), I’ve discovered that flying in and out of Cairo is almost as convenient. A little longer to get home, but it’s MUCH cheaper to fly there and the train system between Alex and Cairo is cheap and comfortable. Wendy and I also discovered that domestic flights in Cairo have almost no lines and that part of the airport is nice and quiet; it was an enjoyable experience.
Speaking of the revolution, one side effect of it was that you cannot go into the airport unless you have a ticket. This was confusing to me when I first arrived, as my driver was not able to greet me at the gate and it took a bit to figure out that I had to LEAVE the airport. This also meant that Moustafa and I couldn’t go into the warm building and find a comfy seat next to an arrivals screen, so we had to sleep in his car. (The lack of an arrivals screen is REALLY annoying.)
The Arabic in the comic should give my Egyptian friends a chuckle. I apologize for poor translations. Also, apparently ClipStudio does not like Arabic (or I don’t know how to make it like Arabic, which is equally likely) because it goes from right to left, so I had to screenshot Arabic text from Google Translate and bring the image in. This is the gripping behind-the-scenes stuff y’all come for, I know.
