Polly

“Resilience: the ability of humans to not merely survive trauma and stress, but to bounce back and be happy and productive”

Amazingly, the smog had cleared up. We met Polly when we asked her to take a photo of us, now that you could clearly see the pyramids from the pool deck. I knew she was our kind of people, as she nursed a glass of red wine and stared at her Kindle at 11AM. It turns out that she had just gotten confirmed that her flight back to California on Monday was cancelled and she was spiraling into depression at having to wait until Wed. locked down in the hotel.  Her room shared the same balcony as ours and we formed an alliance, sharing info on the news of the US evac, the rest of our beer and asking her to dinner with us and the Brits that night, although dinner options were dwindling with only 1 restaurant open. She helped us, too by finding out on the 24^th try that the US embassy Egypt task force was saying that the US evac was “not starting today”.

What IS that smell?

Even when the 3 of us were smoking “sheesha” out of beautiful hookahs on the lanai (gotta love the outstanding photo op) and spending time with other interesting folks, the spookiness of hearing and smelling gunfire, taking cover where possible and camping out in the hotel farthest from the windows after calculating possible bullet “tajectories”, I was doing some drain circling of my own. I was going into resignation that we were stuck and I was becoming inactive. Chris, my hero, was instinctively doing just the opposite. His energy was up and he was thinking back on the words the embassy used “not starting today“, so right after midnight on a brand new day, he called the task force and was answered on the first ring by a concerned human. She registered us for the evac and told us to be at the special VIP terminal at Cairo airport that day, Monday the 31st, no later than 11AM to be ready to board military transport to undisclosed, safe European cities. You’d have loved to see the scene of Chris elatedly jumping around. We called and woke up Polly, who was happy to be woken for such great news. She signed up and we pledged to stick together for the ordeal, officially forging our status as the 3 muskateers.