A Different System

Grant is off buying magazines so I'll pick up where he left off on our helpful Ivory Coast airport employee! At the appointed time, he did return to fetch us and walked us through the airport straight to Emirates check in. No one questioned us, we went through first class check in with Emirates and as it turns out, he was correct when he told us we had to get our luggage (contrary to what we were told in Bamako which was the assurance that it was checked through - shocking, I know!). As an aside, I adore Emirates Airline, they are efficient and courteous and had located our bag within minutes! I don't know what it is with us and luggage but - you guessed it - it was sitting in lost luggage. Anyway, back to our new friend who then escorted us back to the restaurant which he said was a more comfortable place to wait. He advised us what time the plane was coming in and where we were to go. We thanked him! Then he sat down with us and announced that his day was finished and he was leaving. That was followed by a long, awkward silence. He broke the silence when he looked at us and said "little gift?". Even though we knew that was likely the scenario, we stll thought tipping airport employees was unusual. Oh well, its a different system! When we get home, I'm going to try tipping the friendly volunteers in white hats at YYC.

There has been no interesting cultural Africa tidbits today as it has been a travel day. There was some excitement during check out of the hotel this morning where Grant snapped at the desk clerk. They charged us slightly more than they quoted us for the usual reasons...you didn't ask for a double blah, blah, blah. No problem really however they had told us when we checked in that there was a free bus to the airport. You can imagine that when we checked out - there was no bus. They tried to tell me that I had to book it the day before. I said that I had but in Africa the phrase "we need to leave Tuesday morning at 8 am" is apparently often confused with "its a nice day isn't it?". Due to the miscommunication we were taking a taxi which was just enough to put Grant over the edge on the room surcharge. So after printing out the email confirmation, he went back and demanded his money back. Believe me, it is funny to try and translate Grant when he's mad! The poor desk clerk kept anxiously looking at me asking "what's he saying???". (We now have the good cop/bad cop routine down in a multilingual situation!). In the end we got the money back and Grant felt that justice was served. Interestingly, DHL wouldn't let us pay by VISA because it took them too long to collect the money (so they say) however the hotel claimed not to be able to cancel a VISA transaction because the money is instantaneously transferred and can't be reversed. Aaagghh...AFRICA!

More from Ghana shortly!

(PS - we are still trying to confirm passport requirements for Libya but the Canadian Embassy in Mali doesn't know any more than the Calgary/Ottawa offices so we are thinking that for the benefit of all Canadians, we might just have to try it and see what happens!)