Cairo Monstrosity

It's all in the eye of the beholder but this kind of look-at-me ostentatious apartment blocks are still in vogue here. You can just imagine the bathroom taps and seetees that will accompany the exterior. This all at the end of our street, visible from our bedroom window!

In other news, I had a breath-holding hour of tension getting our mobile phones and iPads up and running on local SIM cards. We discovered last time that there is a limit to the number that can be associated with each passport and our previous supplier said we had reached that at the end of our last visit. We did not know if it was a per company restriction or if there is a central government database that controls these things across all suppliers. There were long moments at several times in the process today when the assistant, my passport in hand, called more than one colleague and manager over to look at the screen. It all passed by, but I was already the centre of attraction in a shop full of Egyptian customers and didn’t want the ignominity of leaving empty handy nor face the fact of living here without local phones in action.

After all that, it was off to the Marriot to facilitate my group of CEOs all presently in Philadelphia in the second module of their IESE program. These were the folk I was in Shanghai with last November and will be with again in Barcelona in June.