Mogamma

A couple of days ago, Nate and I ventured into Mogamma:














Mogamma is the huge, Soviet-style building that holds over 3000 government offices and is the center of Egypt's sprawling bureaucracy. In Arabic, Mogamma literally means "together."

We had to go to Mogamma in order to get our visas extended for one year. Many people had warned us about the chaos inside, and so we went expecting the worst. We got there in the morning with most of our necessary documents -- our passport, a copy of our passport, passport sized head-shots (they take copies! so we just copied our passports and cut out the picture!), and lots of money. We had forgotten to get the page with our 30 day Egyptian tourist visa copied, so we queued up at the copier booth on the ground floor. This would be a good time to note that Egyptians don't really queue -- they go where there is space. Any semblance of a line quickly turns to a crowd gathered around some central point. This happens in take-away restaurants (when you're trying to place an order or pick up food), in driving (lanes are ignored), and lines like the one we stood in for copies. Luckily there weren't too many people there yet (maybe around 8 or 9), so it didn't take us long to jam our bodies up to the window and have our copies made.

We then proceeded upstairs to the second floor, as friends had told us that was where the visas were given. We wandered through the halls for a little bit, not knowing exactly where to go, asking a few different security guards along the way, most of whom were unable to help us at all. After enough wandering and asking, we finally found out way to the right section. The hall was filled with windows, almost like the teller windows in banks, with different groups of people crowded around each window. We found that, much to our delight, the windows were all labeled in Arabic and English, so we easily found the correct window. There was, of course, a crowd around the window, people from Sudan, UK, Germany, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. Once we pushed out way toward the window, the woman handed us two forms and told us to come back once we had finished them. We quickly filled it out and pushed through again; while we were waiting to speak to the woman again, a British lady next to us told us we needed to buy stamps. We shuffled back through the hall, found the right window, and bought these stamps that had to go on our visa application -- we each had 7 different stamps, each stamp costing anywhere from LE 3 - LE 50. Anyway, finally with stamps, photocopies, and pictures in hand, we turned in our applications, handed over our passports, and waited.

Now it's a little strange (and unnerving!) to hand over your passport in a foreign country. We weren't given a receipt or anything, just told to come back in a couple of hours and our visas would be ready. We didn't really want to venture far without our passports in hand, so we found two of the few remaining seats along the hall, pulled out our books, and waited.

For those of you who know me, you know that patience is not one of my strengths (understatement?). So while the woman had told us to come back in 2 hour, I started feeling antsy after about ... 35 minutes. Nate managed to make me sit still for another 10 minutes, and then I decided I would go check and see if our passports are ready yet. (Imagine me as a child during road trips ... the "Are we there yet?" started very early on.) So I huddled around the window with others waiting for their passports, amazed at the stacks of paper on the other side. Some how, they manage to do EVERYTHING by hand -- no computers in sight. So there were stacks of passports and visa applications all over the place. Every 5 or 6 minutes, a man would hand the woman sitting at the counter a new stack of passports ... people would then eagerly point out their own passport (from behind a glass wall, mind you), and the lady would hand them out. I have no idea how this process actually manages to work, how hundreds of passports don't get lost or stolen every year, but it does.

In any case, I only waited 10 minutes or so before spotting our passports. The lady readily gave me mine, and when I pointed to Nate's, she asked me some question in Arabic. I couldn't understand, so I just pointed at the passport and nodded some more, and she handed it to me. Lucky for him, we're actually married. =)