Apparently, there wasn’t a manager on duty with whom I could discuss the matter. After a couple more unsuccessful volleys, I lost my patience and left the hotel dejected. I was overheated, exhausted, and had a terrible case of cottonmouth (I hadn’t had water since yesterday). And now, I had no place to sleep. Tears welled up and I cried my way across traffic, trying to figure out what to do next. What I needed was to sit down and go through my guidebook, in order to find another place to stay. But I was fearful of pickpockets, so I kept moving. After about twenty minutes of wandering around, I looked up and saw a little blue sign, descended from heaven: an American Express office!
I wiped the tears from my face and B-lined it. As I walked into the chilly, air-conditioned office, a pleasant woman stood up from her desk and greeted me with a thick accent: “Good afternoon! Can I help you?” She handed me a Dixie cup full of ice-cold water.
The tears started coming, and I literally sobbed out my story of how the man wouldn’t give me a room at the Hilton and how I had good money and I just needed a place for the night and could she help me? She guided me to a chair, refilled my empty cup from a pitcher on her desk, and assured me in a soft, sweet voice, that, yes, she could indeed help me.
She helped me right into the Cairo InterContinental at $120 a night. She also let me use her restroom (where I got a look in the mirror at what the Hilton desk clerk had seen. Yikes! I looked awful!) and showed me on the map where the hotel was. I thanked her sincerely, gathered my belongings, and left en route to my five-star home for the night.
The towels were enormous and supremely soft (it’s true what they say about Egyptian cotton!), the bed was bigger than any I’d ever slept in, and the room service was out of this world.
