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Mme. Hassan appeared at around 12 with my new costume. I was in the middle of the choreo so she pointed to me and said “you keep working” and showed the assistant my costume. She liked the improvements and gave me one of the best compliments when she was talking about me to her assistant. She doesn’t throw around compliments, so I think she meant it.
I was supposed to meet my partner around 12:30 at our hotel, but I ended up getting there an hour late. Mme. Hassan said I could come again the next day at 10 and that she wouldn’t be late tomorrow.
I had a quick lunch in our room and we went out to catch a taxi to the Citadel and then we were going to hang out there after it closed to watch Sufi dancing. The cabs that stopped either didn’t understand Citadel or were asking for 20LE to take us there. While 20LE is less than $4US, I hate being treated like an idiot. We’re in the downtown core, it’s 3KM from us and our book says 5LE is being very generous. Finally we met a guy walked over who was initially annoying but ended up telling us that everything closes at 3 today because Ramadan starts tomorrow. He wasn’t trying to sell us anything or take us anywhere so we believed him and headed back to the hotel for a nap.
Later on we decided to treat ourselves to the Hard Rock Cafe. A dog sniffed our taxi and we had to walk through a metal detector to get inside the walls of the Grand Hyatt. It was our most expensive dinner yet at 160LE (that's 4 dinners at Pizza Hut!). The service was horrible. I'll leave it at that, because I'm not sure if anyone is really interested. The food was pretty good though. There were only 4 other tables at the restaurant and it never got busier.
After we finished dinner we decided to walk home because it was a really cool night with a nice breeze. This taxi driver chased us down, so we said he could drive us. It was the most pimped out taxi in Cairo. He had a VCD player in the console (a lot of taxi's just have spaces where it looks like tape decks were ripped out) and was playing music and videos. It was obviously new and very clean. We'd paid 5LE to get to the Grand Hyatt (which is where the Hard Rock is) but we figured we'd give this guy 10LE for style.
I got out of the taxi and started walking. After a while, I realized I'd lost my partner. I walked back and found him. He took so long because the driver demanded 50LE!! He took the 10LE we gave him and handed it back. My partner finally said "it's 10 or 0" and walked away throwing the money in the cab.
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