Luxor

Hamdi is as ancient a part of Luxor as the Valley of the Kings, the doorman said of our taxi driver. We liked Hamdi; we let our guard down. We tried to walk to dinner, but were accosted on the street with a cheery hello! I'm Mustafa! Nice to see you again! He said he'd just met us at the hotel, where he worked as a chef; didn't we remember? Maybe we didn't recognize him because he had been wearing a mask and a chef's hat? Hahahah, never mind, follow me. He had a strange accent and looked like he spent a lot of time in the gym. We were so disoriented by this misplaced familiarity that we allowed this person to guide us to our destination, a family restaurant called Hussains. 

Mustafa sat in a table next to ours nursing a tea as we ploughed through lentil soup, dill salad, great quantities of meat and pita and baba ganoush, prattling all the while about how shitty his life is in Luxor. How he spent a year in Yorkshire, innit, and had so many great business ideas, just needed some capital, 1 million Egyptian to be exact. That's $60,000 -- nothing for us, innit, and did we want to drink something, smoke something -- he'd like to show us the real Luxor.

Jordan, in turn, replied to his blithe requests for money with questions about his faith: was he ready for Ramadan? Had he ever considered becoming a Sufi? They talked not to teach other but despite each other. At one point in Mustafa's endless sales pitch, Jordan interrupted by saying that religion was the only thing he was interested in. Mustafa was not daunted. He told us of a market where we could get saffron -- the red kind, not the blue kind, that cost only 10 pound.

We later learned that there was a Mustafa who worked as a chef at our hotel. Alas, it wasn't our uninvited dinner guest.