Do I Look Tanned to You?

What a disaster the Hurghada Airport is on a Thursday. I showed up 2 1/2 hours before my flight, thinking I had plenty of time. Turns out the airport is really just a makeshift tent bursting with tanned Europeans who just spent the last week on the beach. There I was, white as a ghost, clutching my Canadian passport like it was the only thing that would separate me from the masses.

Mortified is a pretty good word to describe my feelings when I went inside the tent. On my right was a crowd of people. On my left was this other long, snaking line. It looked as though you had to go through security first before checking in. Hmm...I hadn't expected this. That "oh, shit, I'm going to miss my flight feeling" started to creep in, but that didn't change the fact that there was a line to be entered.

An hour later, I was through security and into the short check-in line. Everything was going smoothly until I noticed that the immigration line looked like it could also take an hour...and I was scheduled to board in less than 30 minutes. Luckily, Egypt is a land where things rarely happen on-time...even flights. And I wasn't the only one in the aforementioned predicament.

At one point while I was sitting at the boarding gate, it was announced over the loudspeaker that it was the final boarding call for a flight to Malmo. Seconds after, I peered over at the immigration line, only to witness a rush of people going from the back to the front. It seemed like half of the flight's passengers were running rather late.

The rest of the travelling went easy. Johanna and Benjamin met me at the airport in Cologne and I am now sitting at their apartment.