Breakfast in Dubai, lunch in Cairo, supper in Casablanca

Dear Diary, yesterday was all a bit odd so I thought that I would tell you all about it.

• Midnight, fast asleep at the SAS Radisson Media City, Dubai.
• 01:50 wake up call for a 2am taxi to the airport, arriving there at 2:30am for a 4am flight.
• 3am get to front of check-in queue to find I am not booked on the flight, my confirmed booking had been cancelled somewhere along the line. Much faffing around by airport staff followed which led to me buying a new ticket at 4am and then hot-footing it to the gate only to find the flight, which had been called by then, was running about an hour late.
• 7am arrive in Cairo. Long wait while colleague waits for his bag and I head off to the other terminal to buy a ticket for the evening flight out of Cairo. We got our stuff done and found the driver that had been arranged for us. The journey was interesting because of the driving (anywhere will do) and the views it gave of the sprawling city,
• 9am arrive at Semiramis InterContinental Cairo Hotel and book a room for the day so that we have somewhere to freshen up before our meeting. The photograph above is the view from the hotel.
• 10am get picked up from the hotel by our local colleague and get taken to the office an hour's drive south in Giza.
• 11am very useful meeting, made the whole trip worthwhile.
• 2pm left office to get flight (us) and back home for sundown (our colleague). It was the first day of Ramadan so everybody else was getting home at that time too.
• 3pm back at the hotel to collect bags and a very quick stroll along the Nile to take some more photographs to prove that I had been there.
• 4:30pm at airport and air-side by 5pm! Two hours to kill so had a coffee and a pastry slice (my first food of the day because of Ramadan) and then made use of the airports wireless internet.
• 11pm arrive in Casablanca. Uneventful trip to our hotel for the next three days.

In the process we went from GMT+3 to GMT-1 which made it a 28 hour day with two longish flights, several hours in airports, more hours in cars, and in the middle of all that, three hours or rather good work.