“Farewell, farewell. Oh, go to hell.”

(As a reminder, that’s a line from Lovecraft’s parody of T.S. Eliot, not an actual message from me to my readers.)

I’m off to the airport not too long from now. It was a special occasion tonight, the first time graduation has been held outdoors on the new campus, which is always gorgeous and even a bit spooky-looking at night. Some kinks remain to be worked out, but this is clearly the new tradition.

Then saw Egypt upset Italy 1-0 in the sport I know as “soccer.” The café where I sat burst into dance, embraces, and applause when time ran out.

Now, the usual caveat about this blog before traveling… Not sure how much or how often I’ll be posting during this latest Balkans trip, which I guess will be my fourth.

passport success

It was a close call, but I made it. The final two hours were spent sitting in the Mogamma, waiting for the afternoon shipment of files to come in. It was an all-or-nothing arrangement– if my file was in the incoming stack, I would get the visa I needed to leave the country tonight; if not, I would have to wait until Saturday, meaning the trip would be pointless since I am speaking on Saturday in Zagreb.

Luck was with me today.

But Mr. Hussein is something else. He dresses a bit like a café waiter, but I learned from his boss that he’s actually a lawyer. That makes sense, now that I know it. There was a definite note of intellectualism to how he went about business, even when pushing and shouting. I ran into a young American guy from Illinois, also picking up a replacement passport, but he told me he’d been at it for 10 days. We did it in 1 day– actually, in about 5 hours total, with a 2-hour break to go home in the middle.

I’ve also gained a newfound respect for Egyptian bureaucracy. Sometimes paperwork is so slow in this country that you imagine a bunch of unfireable slackers in those offices doing the minimum work possible. That assumption was reinforced early in my residence here by something I read in one of the travel guides about a “study” claiming that the average bureaucrat in the Mogamma works some ridiculously small number of minutes per day– 14 minutes, or something like that.

Well, my own eyes tell me that that story is bull-shite. These are probably the hardest-working bureaucrats I’ve ever seen, and definitely the friendliest and most upbeat. Most of them seem to be middle-aged women, clad in headscarves. They work at an incredible pace without too much computerization, so it’s a lot of handwritten notation in logbooks. I never would have expected a feel-good experience in that horrible, pollution-stained late socialist edifice. And they all helped me very much today. That one rude police overlord (the philosophy-hater) was the only person I encountered who was basically unfriendly.

The problem these workers face is obviously understaffing. They have to handle 2 million files per day, I am told.

Two oddest moments of the wait:

1. A soldier walking in with a young woman, the two of them handcuffed together. Hussein speculated that she had probably overstayed her visa. Our location in the building would be the only reason to say so, since she looked rather Egyptian to me, and the soldier’s uniform was more of the “desert commando” variety rather than the “visa police” sort.

2. A cat walked into our crowded corridor. The cat then jumped up on the counter where all the business was done, and strolled down the line meowing. It was allowed to stay there for longer than expected, though someone finally came from behind the counter and chased it away.

The day’s exhausting pace now continues. I have to go out to the new campus for undergraduate commencement, the first-ever time that graduation will be held outdoors at the new campus rather than in a big expensive convention center.

still in limbo

It’s looking pretty good for my departure tomorrow, but I’m not quite there yet. I have the new passport as of this morning. The problem is getting an exit visa from Egypt.

I’m now at home taking a break from the Mogamma (pictured below), the grim-looking bureaucracy building, so hated that a popular Egyptian film was once made about a rebellion there by visitors.

This was my first time inside the building after 9 years here, even though it’s right across the street from the AUC old campus– partly because I never realized that you can just walk right in, and partly because the building is sometimes spoken of in the hushed tones of fear. I’ve always been grateful that the University handles all the practical details for us so that I would not have to enter that place.

However, it’s not as bad on the inside as I expected. Yes, it’s massive and labyrinthine and a bit Soviet-looking. But it’s far brighter and happier inside than I expected. From the scuttlebutt I always imagined the bureaucrats to be both lazy and rude, but neither seems to be the case. They are all hard at work, and there is much smiling and joking, except for the one rude cop who reacted with a cold glare when in answer to his question I said that my subject was philosophy.

But while it may not be as bad an experience as I imagined, I’d be lost at sea without Mr. Hussein, my university-provided “handler” for this experience.

With his help, we did in about half an hour what may have taken me 3 or 4 hours alone. He obviously knows which windows on which floors are the relevant ones for my case. But he also knows when to butt in line and when to hold back silently; when to shout and interrupt and when to listen politely. He knows just the right moment to make a cop smile and work faster with the gift of a cigarette. And despite all of this bureaucracy-surfing skill, he doesn’t appear to have a cynical bone in his body.

They’re sitting on my paperwork for two hours, then I’m returning to meet Hussein and we’ll have another go at it. Alarmingly, they say that my file has to be brought in from 6th of October City, which is just about the most remote western suburb possible.