The day before I left for Aswan I spent about four hours at the train station. One thing that is different about the Middle East (which is also found in Chile) is that people dont wait in lines. Sure, they have to wait if there is more than one person who wants to talk to the guy behind the window, but they are extremely uncivilived about the way they go about it. After waiting in a line that looked like the trading floor of Wall Street for two hours, I finally made it to the the part where there was a metal bar on my left and a wall on my right. I put on my head phones, put one arm on the wall and one on the metal bar. Eventually there was another crowd of people formed behind my right arm, these were the people that would have walked in front of everyone. I wasn’t sure if they were yelling at me, because of my music, or if they just came to the realization that this seems to be much more civilized and that maybe they should strike up a conversation with their line nieghbor, maybe make a friend or two. The high level of stress caused by the people yelling in Arabic and pushing at the front of the line, to fight for who gets their hand in the window next, was drowned out by the only heavy metal music I own in my ipod. I could picture the things they were probably saying to each other in Arabic because I was thinking the same thing, “Back the F*&% up, get in the back of line, I was here first” (if that sounds like anger in my words it’s because it is). Eventually, I got to the front of line, boxing out the guy behind me who tried to slide his arm under mine into the window, filling the window with my head and shoulders, and I got my ticket to Aswan for later that night at around midnight.
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