They’ve come up with their own version, a campaign that is going to change the way Egyptians deal with tourists.
It seems that someone at the ministry noticed that a lot of tourists leave Egypt with a bad taste in their mouths, perhaps even the impression that they have been ripped-off during their visit. (I wonder whose cousin got the contract to do the heavy lifting on this insightful piece of analysis?)
Apparently the solution is to “educate� the “less educated, the less socially conscious� types who overcharge tourists and don’t treat them as nicely as perhaps they feel they deserve.
Not to confuse these simple folk, they have designed a nice simple little ad for them, the story explains.
“… they kept the concept simple. The first series of print and television ads take the one-pound note — with its picture of Abu Simbel — and asks the Egyptian if he’s ever really looked at it. The camera zooms in on the monument, which slowly vanishes, leaving the paper almost entirely blank. “Hopefully, visually portraying the one-pound note with and without tourism drives the message home the pound would just not be the same,� Mustafa says.�
Later stages apparently will teach personal grooming.
Egypt Today is anodyne by necessity. They can’t afford to say anything that might annoy a potential advertiser or ministry contact, so I guess we can excuse the passive reproduction of this patronizing muddle-speak. The implication that Egyptians need MacDonald’s-style service training has got to rub some people the wrong way, however.
How can you tell an educated, socially conscious person? He’s the one who smiles at the foreigner, the one who speaks a little English. Maybe he’ll have on a hair net as well.
The best part is at the end, however. This is where the “communications consultant� from the ministry gets all sweaty about the Orwellian angle. “The investment in a national effort like this should stem from everyone’s sense of corporate social responsibility,� she is quoted as saying, and then as being “hopeful� for legislative changes: “Sometimes you have to change laws and regulations to get people not to do things…�
So, while one section of the regime has guys in polyester shirts beating demonstrators and shoving rolled up cardboard up their butts, another is going to pass a law that bans frowning at foreigners.
At the end of the day, it’s just not enough any more to lay there and take it, you gotta smile nicely for the tourists as well.
What a joke. Egyptians are among the nicest and most welcoming people to tourists and god knows there are enough obseqious English speaking touts to go around, why on earth should they not try to make a buck or two from a rich khawaga, and where in the world do people not do this?
The main legitimate complaint I hear about people’s experience with Egyptians is the widespread anti-Semitism. Will the government be sponsoring a bunch of ads designed to combat that? Think of all the Israeli tourists they could get!
Brian – any examples of this? The one time I went walking in a baladi market with people including an Israeli who spoke excellent Arabic, when the usual welcome in Egypt, where are you from questions came out, he said Israel, and I braced myself for hostility but people were surprisingly cool about it and said “fi mashakil” between the countries, but the people are nice. I imagined it would be similar in Dahab and other places where they need Israeli tourists’ money.
Not specifically – these were American Jewish students who have spent a lot of time in the region. I’d guess they’re more annoyed than what they see in bookstores of some of the conspiracy theories advanced in cafes and the like.
Ah, OK. I don’t doubt there would be some hostility, I just wonder what concrete forms it takes and how it might affect tourism. There’s discomfort related to political tension (not much you can do about that) and then there’s actual harrassment and racism. And like I said, I wonder if anyone would harrass or make racist remarks to a spending tourist’s face.
I know many Middle Easterners are wary of travelling to the US these days and with books like “The Arab Mind” and “What Went Wrong” on bookstore shelves, not to mention actual remarks one gets as an Arab-looking person, of which I have some experience…the fingerprinting is easier to shrug off, the remarks require a thicker skin.