We arrived in Alexandria after a short two and a half hour train ride from Cairo. We were completely exhausted and spent after a long and interesting train ride from Luxor to Cairo the night before. We had bought our first class tickets with our friends Alex and Rose that morning, and the man in the booth gave us a piece of paper with some writing on it instead of regular tickets . Since he worked there, we just assumed it was fine. Yeah…not so much! We got to our train 15 minutes early at 11:15, thinking we had plenty of time to find our nice, wide, reclining, leather seats and get comfortable. The man had said car number 1, so we went to the front of the train. Then a guard looked at our piece of paper and pointed us all the way down to the other side, about 10 cars away. We followed him and walked quickly down to that side. Then the guard gave the paper to a man on the train, who pointed us back to where we started! So we followed him to the front of the train.

A bit worried, we entered a random car in case the train started to leave while we were looking around. We found what appeared to be first class, and asked a woman sitting nearby to look at the paper for us. She said we should be in car number 4, the next one over. We went into that car, and our seat assignments were already occupied. So we gave the paper to someone else, and they led us through countless cars towards the back of the train. Then there was a lot of discussion among 3 or so attendants, and they pointed us into a pretty shabby room with six seats, 3 on each side facing each other. They said, “OK OK OK.” Then a man stayed in the doorway and asked, “Sleep? Sleep?” over and over. To get him to go away, we said, “yes, um, thank you. OK. Goodbye.” The seats did not recline, and there was no door, just an open doorway for people to walk by and look in (which happened pretty often). We were completely confused and very curious about what was written on our slip of paper. To us, it clearly wasn’t the first class we had paid for! Rose and Alex took the paper and tried to find our “real” seats again, but it was about as fruitless as all of our other attempts. Finally, a young guy came by and asked if we wanted anything, and we asked if he spoke English. He said, “Yes.” Then Rose pointed up the train and said, “First class?” He replied, “Breakfast?” Then she said, “Carriage one?” To which he replied, “Courage?” It was pretty funny. We then gave him the piece of paper, and he said “please wait.” I saw him go next door and show it to the passengers in that room. They spoke for a little while. Then I saw them all laugh and shrug, to me a sure sign that we were stuck in that room for the night. He came back, returned the paper, and said, “It’s OK. You can stay here” with a kind smile on his face, as if it was exactly what we wanted to hear. We smiled back and said “Thank you.”

So we turned out the light and did our best to make ourselves somewhat comfortable, which never really happened. I woke up to see a random man standing in the doorway staring long and hard at all of us. A little while later a different man came in and pointed at the seat by Rose and Alex and said, “Yes? Yes? I? Sit down? Sit down?” really loudly. Kevin wanted to say no, but the guy seemed pretty firm about it so he said OK. The man sat down and slept but was off of the train by morning. A guy came in around 8 something and said we’d be getting into Cairo soon. We ordered some tea from him and he came back with it. We had brought some bananas for breakfast and he peeled them and gave them to us, and peeled one for himself even though we didn’t offer it to him. Cairo was the last stop, so we knew we would have no problem understanding when to get off. However, the “Sleep? Sleep?” attendant had come by earlier and said, “Giza? Cairo?” We said, “Cairo.” And when we arrived he came in and said, “Here. Cairo.” and stood there for a minute. As we got our stuff together, he stuck out his hand and said, “Money? Money?” I assume he was asking for a tip for telling us our stop. We told him no and were pretty glad to get off that train.

The thing is, we still have no idea what was written on that piece of paper or why several people couldn’t seem to figure out where we really needed to be! For me the funniest part was that a couple of times the train attendants asked regular passengers to help them find our seats. We also don’t know if we got screwed by the ticket office (probably) or if our “private car” was some kind of first class. In the end, as Rose put it cheerfully, “At least we made it to Cairo.”