Welcome to the Muddle East

So most of what I've been saying has been recounting events, but now I want to try and share a bit of the flavour. They couldn't have organised crime here because of what the name implies, instead they just have corruption. Gina's husband Peter is almost at his wit's end doing business here, because nothing gets done without bribery. Or take the airports for example, there is rarely a queue in existence: you'll be checking in for your flight, and the next guy is leaning his elbow on your counter holding his passport, waiting for you to leave. Egypt was the craziest, especially the roads. Ignore the lanes, forget your indicators, just go for it and honk like crazy so that others hear you coming through. But everyone is doing that at the same time, on three or four lane roads without traffic lights that bend and swerve and do round-a-bouts and fly-overs and such. It seems that the only rule is that if you get in first and honk the most, others give way. It felt like you don't need to look behind you, because everyone is actually watching out in front of them to see what you're doing, because you might do anything. The only time indicators really get used is when you chuck your hazard lights on in the middle of traffic, just to let those behind you know that you've had to slow down to 60 km/h. Our first taxi driver had, honestly, six or eight mirrors all over his windscreen so that he had eyes in the back of his head. The second taxi driver just had a huge convex mirror, and liked using his arm to indicate turning left. They're funny salesmen in the tourist area the Egyptians, no-bullshit phrases like "I don't know what you're looking for, sir, but I'm sure I can sell it to you. Just tell me how I can get your money from you as quickly as possible." Or the Jordanian at Petra offering a ride on his donkey "Ferrari? Air-conditioned taxi?" Getting back to the 'organisation', I was reminded of a class at TAFE many years ago, where in order to explain different organisational structures, the teaching aids (props) gave racial names to them. So there was the Western model, which is your typical pyramid hierarchy, one box at the top connected to more below by lines and repeated. There were one or two more structures, maybe a flat model which is just one horizontal row of boxes, one connected to the next. The last model was just a whole lot of boxes scattered randomly with no lines connecting them at all; this was the Arabian model. Yes, schooling really taught you things back in the days before rampant PCness. Oh, when we went to catch our flight from Luxor to Cairo, our ticket had 11:15am, and our boarding pass had 10:30am. And, there was no-one at the gate or anywhere nearby to ask about it. It wasn't till about 11am that some dude yells out "Cairo! Cairo!" that we were sure. Then when we get to Cairo, a member of airport staff tells us that we have to go upstairs to get our connecting flight. He then says, "by the way, can I use your passport to buy something from duty free?" Then there's the passport photo issue - some customs officers didn't even look at my photo. I'm fairly sure about this, because it usually took two or three looks and a shake of the head before the rest would dubiously stamp it and return it to me.