Revolt! Feb. 4

Today was thankfully uneventful but it was like one of those westerns or thrillers where the good guys are like “it seems quiet…maybe a little too quiet” and then something blows up or the bad guys come out shooting. So my day was like that, except for the exciting part. Fridays are usually completely dead in the mornings. Most businesses don’t open until after prayers around 1 and people usually stay in with their families until then so it wasn’t unusual when I went for my morning walk with Whiskey that hardly anyone was around. It was a little weirder when I went to get lunch at a local bagel shop owned by an American and his Polish wife and didn’t see anyone on the way there. The shop was open as usual and I had an awesome grilled chicken sandwich for lunch with my friend Dena and her British roommate, Carmen. They were planning to head to Morocco for two weeks to escape the tension of feeling trapped in their apartment with nothing but State TV (they haven’t been in town long enough to get a satellite dish) so we had a nice lunch and quick chat and they headed off to get their tickets out of town.

I heard some rumors about foreigners getting beaten up or detained by police or, scarier, abducted by ordinary Egyptians on suspicion of being foreign spies and then turned into the police for questioning but the rumors were in other neighborhoods and I didn’t feel threatened as I went about my errands today.

I went to visit Amani and Karim and their family down the road from me. They have the most amazing chocolate biscuits they serve with tea or coffee so even on a Friday, which is supposed to be a family day, I can’t resist bothering them. With so many people evacuating, they are some of my few friends left in the neighborhood. I saw about four people on the fifteen minute walk back from their house and three were police officers guarding one of the embassies.

Another friend had called me while I was still at their place to discuss the targeting of foreigners so I was really freaked out right before I took Whiskey for his second walk around four but besides the streets still feeling like a ghost town, everything was fine. We got to walk in the middle of the road for most of the time because there was no one else around. It was the quietest I have ever seen any part of Cairo.

Despite the total absence of people, there was also a refreshing absence of trash since residents and shop owners have been sweeping the streets and bagging garbage themselves (people are actually putting trash cans in front of their stores and passersby are actually USING THEM!) and the garbage trucks finally made it into the neighborhood a few days ago to pick up the bags of trash. Now there is just one mystery bag that smells like about 8 pounds of poop sitting in a squashy lump on one corner that Whiskey and I carefully avoid.

My mom said Fareed Zakaria said on CNN today that whereas we are used to seeing protests lead by the likes of Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr., these protests have no leader. I have heard similar complaints on CNN International and BBC and find it a bit silly. This precise complaint proves that the protesters truly want what they are demanding: free and fair elections. They want a government that represents them, in all their chaos and diversity. They don’t want to switch one man out for another, they don’t, as a group, have a particular president in mind to lead them. That’s the POINT. They want the right to vote in an election where their votes are counted, not altered or cast aside, and they are not hunted down and beaten up for them afterwards.

The party of the guy they want out has a strangle hold on 97% of the parliament, yet one tenth of the population of Cairo has joined the protests. Do the math. The party in power doesn’t represent them. The parliament doesn’t represent them. They don’t all WANT to vote for the same guy. That’s the point.

Heard some disturbing stories about food, blankets and medical supplies sent by average Cairenes to support the protesters in Tahrir being confiscated by police and Mubarak supporters. Medical supplies tossed in the Nile and those carrying them detained and interrogated, sometimes for hours. One woman bringing extra blankets to the friends’ house she was planning to stay out AWAY from the city center was detained and questioned for four hours and her blankets were taken away even after they determined she was not headed to Tahrir. She was finally released, shaken.

The Egyptian police have arrested the Al Jazeera bureau chief and a Cairo journalist. Al Ahram, a state run newspaper reported the first death of a journalist in yesterday’s fighting. Al Jazeera’s offices were ransacked and burned by unknown thugs. Despicable.
The government reports that 5000 were injured in the violence of yesterday and the day before. Today’s protests were peaceful, with the help of the army which stepped up again to secure Tahrir against government thugs. The line to get frisked to get into the square stretched all the way over the Qasr el Nil bridge to Zamalek and what Amani and I noticed most prominently in the news coverage is that the video actually showed Egyptians waiting in line one behind the other. It’s a miracle! Egyptians have learned to stand in line! All it took was eleven days of revolution.

The helicopters kept up their nonsense all day but seem to have finally given it a rest in the last hour or so. No shooting tonight (I think they’ve run out of teargas – which, if you hadn’t heard, was manufactured in the US and was expired) and the atmosphere on the streets of Zamalek is fairly relaxed. I took a dog walk with my neighbor around 9:30 and we had to dodge around two soccer games among our protectors. A single truck of police are stationed in the middle of the island that can zoom off and report to trouble spots if necessary but so far all is quiet.

The Central Bank said something today about wanting to try to resume business on Sunday, but demonstrators are calling for big rallies on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday so I doubt I’ll be going back to work any time soon. I am one of very few foreigners I know who are still in Zamalek, and the only foreigner from my office still here. I am going to work my email contacts to try to make some new friends tomorrow and reconnect with some old ones!