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Egypt
Pension Roma Abounds with Character!
Perth, Australia, March 26, 2007
Pension Roma is a story in itself.
There, we met some of the most helpful staff we could have asked for, which was sure a nice thing considering the tension we both felt when first arriving in Egypt. The decoration of the place made us feel like we were taken back in time. Our very spacious room full of old-style heavy wooden furniture, nice wooden floors, wide windows - and also the scary 1940's style elevator by the reception- sure gave us a homey feeling (just like visiting one's grandma's house!), which was just what we needed at the moment. We later found out that many of the guests staying at Roma literately made it their home base in Egypt. Some of them were artists and writers who in between occasional travels to their countries of origin had been spending the last 8 to 10 years living in Cairo. There we met Anne, a French writer, who was actually writing a book about Pension Roma and the many stories about the guests that she met there throughout the years. We sure met some real characters, and learning their stories from Anne was a major contribution to keeping the surreal aspect of our experience in Cairo even more surreal!
Hans, an art collector from Holland, strongly believed that anyone with a profound knowledge of statistics (like him, for example!) would be likely to establish strong connections with random people coming from different cultures or backgrounds. Hans was really a walking encyclopedia, but one who through the use of logic and his very profound knowledge of statistics would add a bit of an aspect of clairvoyance to the whole experience of meeting him for the first time. He would introduce himself to people and just by looking at them he would guess where they were from, their families' backgrounds, and he would cite some of the most bizarre statistics about one's country and even details about their personalities. When meeting Andy and learning his last name, he immediately told Andy many details about his background, but of course, we were a little bit skeptical being that part of Andy's family comes also comes from Holland! The same thing happened when meeting Liza and others that we watched him meet every morning at breakfast time. He claimed it was all due to his knowledge of statistics, but it sure makes you wonder if he is an art collector with a bit of psychic abilities! We have learned from Anne that Hans disappeared without a trace. They went out for dinner one night and he left the restaurant unexpectedly and was never seen back at the hotel by any staff. His luggage was not in his room and nobody ever could find out how he left without being seen.
We also met George, a young English journalist who believed that someone related to the government or to MI6, England's equivalent of the CIA, was following him everywhere in Cairo. George's thing was: he never finished any of his sentences, which drove some people nuts at Roma. He mentioned to Anne something about refusing to do a “mysterious” job for the government and shortly after that, he started getting strange phone calls and was being followed. Toward the end of our stay there, he would drink a lot in the hotel lounge, which is not something appreciated by the Muslim culture in Egypt! We are not sure what happened to George, the last we heard from Anne, was that he was still drinking and acting really strange.
Giovanna, a 45 year-old pregnant woman from Italy, had the most impressive story of all of those we met there! Giovanna was escaping from her “ex-husband” (apparently a very rich man with many government connections). She had been working on a book that would prove her innocence and denounce her husband for illegal and abusive actions he committed against her in the past. In order to take over Giovanna's deceased family properties, he kept Giovanna in a mental health institute for many years, but Giovanna was not mentally ill. She struggled during many years trying to prove that she was not crazy but without success, so she decided to escape. Once out of the mental health institute, she met a man who she fell in love with and with whom she decided to have a child. But because her ex-husband had found out where she was, they both had to go their separate ways, and months later Giovanna arrived in Cairo. She was almost 9 months pregnant. She was so skinny that we only found out she was pregnant after Anne told us. Giovanna had piles and piles of pages she had written to publish in her book to prove her ex-husband's guilt, and she also had all the documentation she had collected from different doctors proving that she was erroneously put in a mental health institute. She decided that the child to come would bring her the liberty that was taken from her during so many years of her life. After traveling throughout Egypt, we came back to Cairo and stayed at Pension Roma before taking our flight to Athens. We then learned that Giovanna's ex-husband had discovered she was in Cairo and so she decided to escape once again. She was about to have her child and decided to go to the hospital for a check-up and when she came back to the pension, she received a phone call from Italy that indicated that her ex-husband knew where she was. Giovanna seemed to think that her ex-husband was able to find out where she was through his contacts within Egypt's health and government systems. Giovanna took a taxi to an “undisclosed” Egyptian city to meet a friend of hers that was flying from Italy to help with the whole situation. However, Giovanna left all her clothes and luggage behind, even her manuscripts, and took only the clothes she was wearing. When we got back to Roma, we could still see her luggage sitting in the hall and the staff was waiting to see if they could find out anything about where Giovanna was staying. That was the last story we heard in Cairo before taking our flight to Athens at 3:00 a.m...
The soap opera-fantastic like character of Roma's guests' stories only added to our fascination with the multitude of Egyptian cultural stories and, also, tales we learned during our visit to this magnificent country.
P.S.: All names above, except Anne's, have been changed to preserve the safety and identity of those involved!