Comrade Razinin (played by Bela Lugosi): (reading from a secret informer’s report sent from Istanbul) How can the Bolshevik cause gain respect among the Moslems if your representatives Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski get so drunk they throw a carpet out their hotel window and complain to the management that it does not fly? Garbo: (trying to suppress a smile) Oh, they shouldn’t do such things.
-Ninotchka, screenplay by Billy Wilder et al.
I took an Economics of Egypt course at American University in Cairo in the late 1970s that covered the Infitah, the so-called Opening, of Nasser’s socialist system to Western capitalism that was then just getting started. Whenever you bought anything or ate in a restaurant I remember there were always elaborate receipts in quadruplicate. To be filed with Central Planning, no doubt.
As more Americans came to Cairo, it took a lot for the Egyptians to get used to. A friend and I went to Alexandria for a long weekend and stayed at a hotel on the Corniche with a rude and officious desk man. I guess he didn’t get the memo from Central Planning to lighten up. I didn’t like him especially when he said he wouldn’t break a five pound note for me, worth about seven dollars. Most things in those days cost piasters, not guineas, so a bank note on the street didn’t easily get changed.
When it was time to check out I went to the room by myself and threw our two bags from the window facing the Corniche and passed by the desk man saying I’d be back later. We ran to catch the afternoon train to Cairo. I always wondered what people might have said who saw the bags come flying out. I wonder how he worded the unpaid receipt for what was left of Central Planning. Mafeesh fulous, There is no money, written four times.