Strange things that you do when away for so long

Government building, Asmara
Originally uploaded by CharlesFred.

Yes, indeed, yesterday evening saw Fred and I in our hotel room, drinking a botle of cold Chardonnay with peanuts watching the film Grease on TV. I had avoided watching that film for 28 years, but now I have seen it. It pales by comparison to Rocky Horror Picture Show which was made 3 years earlier and which it seeks to imitate in many ways. Sandy was a poor copy of Janet.

Anyway, today a business day - when we made it to the National Tourist Office (whose only literature was two glossy magazines about Eritrea from 1997*), to the bank to change that travellers' cheque the other people refused, the Dutch Embassy to register and the Djibouti Embassy to aply for visa's (the tourist information we got about that little country looked very appealing... maybe we will stay there longer than the day or two we had planned).

Further, it seems that KLM have changed their database so that I CAN now use my miles to pay for both Fred and I to return, thus saving us a E 1,000 or so for the ticket, which then more than makes up for our over-spend in the Middle East. The problem here in Eritrea is now that we have so much local currency and little obvious way of spending it all, unless we go for expensive 4x4 journeys up country.

I still have to finish off the booking of the flight (there was just ONE piece of info which I needed and didn't have and that came right at the very end of the procedure - but still... Anyway, if all goes well (inshallah, as we say in these parts), we should be back at 11.35 am on Sunday 15th January 2006! And now it is DONE!!! The booking has been confirmed!

* - also quite worryingly the man at the Tourist Information Office said that the few pages of our Africa on a Shoestring had more information about Eritrea than he had. Ooops!