An interesting series of happenings

In Cairo, it's pretty difficult to find an apartment without using a simsar, or real estate agent-y kind of guy. They take you around to different flats until you find the perfect one, then collect 10% of the total amount of your contract. Luckily we are only living somewhere three months, so this wasn't too substantial of an amount, especially since our simsar found us such a great place.

The other night, one of the simsars (we'll call him Mohammed for the sake of anonymity) came to the apartment to pick up a group of students, and in front of everyone got into an intense fight with the police, got the crap beaten out of him, and was I think arrested. We were all kind of in shock and totally confused until one of our teachers explained to us later what had happened. Apparently, he wasn't allowed in the hotel because he is a lower-class Egyptian, and so the hotel managers called the police when he came in to meet us. The whole situation was exacerbated by the fact he was acting kind of uppity about the whole thing since he thought since he was working for Americans he could get away with betraying the system. Well... he couldn't.

Then today, for some reason I can't understand, he took the whole program out to a fancy lounge place for dinner. He probably spent at least $600 buying us all dinner. The actual place we ate was sweet. It was a hookah lounge so there were all these people just casually smoking it, while studying or playing on the computer or having dinner with the family. The food was pretty good too, and my chocolate milkshake was amazing. Overall, I won't understand why he bought us dinner after we got him beat up by the police, but I will appreciate it!