From Dubai: The Saga Continues

My day today / the last 24 hours:

I had a meeting in the morning, so I was in the client's office for a few hours, then headed back to my hotel room to pack. In the course of doing so, I couldn't remember where I'd hidden all the Christmas presents I'd picked up as I've been hopping around. After tearing the room apart, I concluded they were either stolen, or I left them in the room safe at the last hotel I was in, which was two weeks ago... so pretty much the options were stolen or stolen.

Frantic, I went back to the hotel where they told me they didn't have anything. Ready to jump from a high building (if there were any around) / call the police, they realized they spelled my name wrong on the reservation. Using the right name, something did come up in the computer, though I wasn't sure what... the staffer had to go check the safe. Ten minutes later she calls me at the front desk to describe what I had left. My initial relief that she'd found my stuff started evaporating as I sat there for another ten minutes, only to finally see her walking back with a manager, both empty-handed.

The manager told me they did find something and it was logged as being in the safe, but it wasn't in the safe, so he was checking the other safe in the front office. Needless to say, it wasn't there either.

The net is that after another 15 minutes of torment, he finally came back with the bag of my stuff, and everything was there. From the bribery coaching I'd received, I knew South Africans love getting their hands on greenbacks... I was told that in the event of being pulled over by the police, just hand them a $1 USD bill and they will let you go, even though that is not a lot of money there (the equivalent of maybe $5 in the US, taking exchange rates and relative prices?). Given that it's near the holidays and they literally saved me from excruciating self-torment, I whipped out a $20 bill and asked him to share it with everyone who was involved with finding and safe-keeping the presents.

He literally turned around and booked it while the two women at the front desk, having seen me pull out US currency, had on saucer plate-sized eyes and reacted like he was absconding with their first-borns and started yelling at him to come back with the money (this is a four star hotel, so the staff was otherwise very professional with a stiff sense of decorum). I didn't want to get involved, so I just ran out to get to US Consulate, where I had an appointment to get an emergency passport (since the Nigerians still have yet to respond to any of my messages and continue to hold my passport hostage... Side note: On the flight from Jo'burg to Dubai, I watched District 9 - the sci-fi film about aliens being interred in Johannesburg ghettos, an allegory to the camps / ghettos set up during apartheid... the only humans living in the ghetto are Nigerians, who are there to steal / scam the aliens out of their weaponry so they can use it in their global criminal gangs... The Nigerians seem to be in general very bitter, saying the whole world discriminates against them and treats them all like criminals... the more I learn, the more it seems like the stereotype is broadly supported with fact, but I will have more on that when I post the near-kidnapping experience our team had there).

Before I could head to the consulate, I had to fill up the rental car with gas. I stopped at a Shell station where the attendant (all stations are full service in SA) told me I couldn't use a credit card, but I could use a debit card. I handed him my debit card, which he informed me was not an actual debit card, despite Citibank clearly labeling it as such. Apparently "real" debit cards don't have raised numbers like credit cards. I surmised this was not a case of incompatible technology, but rather a case in which the management didn't want to pay the fees associated with routing transactions through Visa / MC / Amex networks.

I drove down to the next station where the attendant informed me my debit card would work... until the tank was full. At that point, he decided my card actually would not work because again, it had the "raised numbers". Having reached my hustling saturation point, I turned indignant and told him that he was going to have to use the card, which I knew would work, because I didn't have any cash and was about to leave the country. He actually turned out to be an honest guy and confirmed that it would work, his boss just wouldn't let him run it. So I asked to speak to the boss, who was sitting under an umbrella next to the car wash with 4-5 other employees, watching some workers dig a ditch. Surprisingly, the attendant even introduced me by saying he had made a mistake and told me the card would work.

The boss informed me that their computer systems wouldn't take a debit card with raised numbers. I asked if we could just try it, and he said sure, but it won't work. So I said, "Great, let's do that," and started walking back towards the store. He again said we could try, but it would just be a waste of time, so I should just take cash out of the ATM.

So for about five minutes I kept shuffling us towards the store while we cycled through a refrain of "I understand it won't work, but just humor me... it will take two seconds, and if it doesn't work, I'll take the cash out and no problem," and a response along the lines of "Yes, we could try it, but I'm not going to because it won't work / it will screw up the computers / it will waste our time / etc."

There was a police officer there sitting in his truck, so finally I pointed to him and said, "Ok, so you're saying if I go ask him about this, he will tell me you can't take my 'debit' card?" His response was something along the lines of, "He's not working here... he's from another district...." ????

That quickly led to, "If you want to talk to the owner of the station, he's the fat white guy right there."

So I talk to the fat white guy who levels with me and says, "Yeah, that will work, but I don't want to pay the bank fees." After informing him that I was just a poor American who didn't have any cash, etc., he agreed to let me use it.

The card was returned as "void" from the cashier, so I asked to see the printout showing the bank's message. I explained to them that "void" wouldn't be the response from the bank, it would be something like "declined". At that point though, after a good 20 minutes playing this game and running out of time until my consulate appointment, I completely lost my patience, just took the cash out, and stormed out of there.

I pulled out of the gas station and turned onto the highway on-ramp, only to slam on the brakes to avoid a mixed line of cars reversing and fully driving the wrong way. There was an accident that had completely clogged the highway, and in Africa the direction of traffic is a democratic decision. So there was another 5-10 minutes of fun, trying to reverse / turn around without being hit by cars turning onto the on ramp, cars driving the wrong way, and reversing cars. Though I did watch a pissed-off guy back in to a big BMW that was trying to turn around with complete disregard for any sort of right-of-way (if there is such a concept in such a situation).

Somehow I managed to find my way around the accident on side roads and reached my exit with 10 minutes to go until my appointment. When I finally came around the last bend and saw Old Glory flapping in the breeze, I swear I could hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic playing in the car. Despite having to negotiate with security for five minutes to let me park in the compound and avoid parking half a mile away (the State Department website malfunctioned when I was trying to print out my appointment confirmation / parking pass), I don't think I'd ever been so relieved to be on American soil with other Americans. The consular staff got a kick out of my story about the Nigerians holding my passport hostage... they said that was a new one for them, but they weren't too surprised.

The next travail came when trying to pass through immigration (unless you count having to pay $250 in excess baggage fees). Apparently the officer I drew was not familiar with the concept of an emergency passport. He kept asking me how I got into the country without having "any stamps or anything" in my passport. Determined that I had illegally snuck into the country and was subsequently attempting a legal exit / that I was a spy, he got angry and yelled over to his boss, a big hairy white guy named Peach (Africans have some great first naming conventions... like Dudu from the hotel staff and Justice from the airline).

Peach apparently was familiar with emergency passports and / or sympathetic to the CIA and quickly cleared me (I'm not looking forward to the interrogation I'm going to get in the US - "Um, so I was in South Africa, Dubai, and Bangladesh, and the Nigerians took my passport hostage.")

Then, after playing musical chairs with a large family with screaming kids (I've learned that's the price of getting bulkhead seats on international flights), I ended up sitting next to a Nepalese Imam who teaches at a Madrassa in South Africa who was determined to convert me to Islam. He actually was a very nice guy and he asked for my business card so he could "keep in touch" with me. I'm actually very much looking forward to hearing from him and adding him to my list of friends in the Muslim world,

And now I'm about to shut down and board my flight to Bangladesh... very interesting country and I'll have a lot to post once I get there.