First day in Egypt

So here I am, back in Bahrain from Egypt. I attended the IPM (International Presidents Meeting) for AIESEC and it was an amazing experience. Sitting in a room with 200 people from over 96 countries is an experience no one can ever forget.

I got to Egypt at around 2.30 am and by the time we got to the hotel (if that’s what it’s called) it was around 4.30 am. The name of the hotel was Caesars Palace, if Caesar knew that they would be naming a hotel like this after him, he would have never wanted to be a hero. I was given a room number and was told I had to share it with a girl from Moldova, naturally I though that would happen and I was completely prepared for that. When I got to the room, I could not open it and after knocking for more than 5 minutes at the door, someone opened the door. I was very excited to meet my roommate whom I was only going to be with for four hours, but apparently she was too sleepy to even say hello. When I got into the room I got the shock of my life, it was a tiny room with things falling apart, we had one bed which I could barely call a queen sized bed and we had to share that. My roommate went to sleep on one side and told me to sleep on the other side; I went through my bags to get my pajamas and toothbrush out and went into the toilet to wash up. When I got in there I wondered if I did the right thing by coming to the conference; it’s true that it is a wonderful conference but is it worth living in a dump like this. Anyways I washed up and went to bed, I only had two hours to get some rest but I could not fall asleep. There was only one blanket and it didn’t do much because it was freezing cold and the bed felt like a rock, anyways after a couple of minutes of tossing and turning I fell asleep.

I got up at 7.30am and woke up my roommate who thanked me for waking her up. She apologized about the previous night and introduced herself formally, she was Tatiana from Moldova. We changed into our traditional clothes, packed our bags, took some pictures and went down stairs to get into the buses to leave. When I got down I saw Claude wearing his Bahraini thob and a big smile on his face, boy was I glad to see him. We got to the buses and went to the Marriott Hotel where our Opening Plenary was conducted. I sat at a table with people from Iceland, Thailand, Philippines, Bangladesh, Canada and a couple more countries. The girl from Iceland was very interested in my country and started asking me where it was and what the country was like and the culture etc, I tried to tell her as much as I could without giving her a first bad impression. After the Plenary we got to the buses again and headed to the Cairo Opera House and got our stuff out and ready for the Global Village. We had Egyptians come and ask about Bahrain and tried out sweets, it was really good, by the end of it I got to take a round with John to some of the stalls that we still up, I visited Australia, Brazil, Pakistan and some more. After that we got into the buses again and headed for Palmera Resort in Ain Sokhna where the conference would be conducted; it was the longest drive of my life. Half way I felt like I was suffocating, there was no ventilation in the bus and the bus smelled like a mixture of wet stinky socks, farts and stinky armpits; I was about to cry when we stopped for a break in the middle of nowhere. We got down at heaven; the cold fresh air was the best thing that happened to me since I got to Egypt, I just wanted to stay there for the rest of the trip; the whole 15 minutes I tried not to think of getting into the bus again but I could not help it. They called us back, so I went to the door took the deepest breath of my life and got into the bus.

Finally after a while we got to the resort, it was a really beautiful place. We got down and went straight to dinner; it was good food, finally some good started coming out of the trip. After that we went and registered to get into our rooms. This time I was roommates with Kristina from Austria who was the current MCP for Qatar. We got to the room, and I found the same double bed where we had to sleep on. I didn’t care I had a good roommate and it was a good airy room with a very nice balcony. I took a shower and we had to meet down to do our roll call preparation, after that I went straight to bed hoping tomorrow would be a better day.