February 3, 2011
9:53pm
Today has been a difficult day. The jubilance and celebratory atmosphere of the peaceful protests is marred now by the bloody street war yesterday. The good guys are a little on the defensive and thankfully the international media has picked up the truth of the story that many of the so-called “pro-Mubarak supporters” that attacked protesters yesterday were plainclothes police and/or paid to cause violence. Fortunately, the bad guys are on the defensive too, and I say fortunately because although the news is not good for me, with the new VP giving a long interview on State TV blaming foreigners for everything, the continued backpedaling and mixed messages from the administration (while the VP was blaming foreigners, the new Prime Minister said he would start an investigation into whether security forces were involved in the violence) is strengthening the stance of foreign governments against Mubarak.
There are some scary rumors of foreigners being targeted by government funded gangs (I heard a foreigner was beaten to death in Tahrir yesterday) and the media reports it is basically open season on journalists. The US Embassy has provided its last evacuation flight out of Egypt and those of us that wish to leave after this will have to make our own arrangements. Honestly, most foreigners were making commercial reservations anyway, as they are significantly cheaper than the evac flights provided by the State Department. Interestingly, I learned that most countries fly their citizens out of emergency situations for free. The US is fairly unique in requiring reimbursement. Even Mexico was evacuating its citizens from Egypt free of charge.
Mexico. Take a minute and think about that. What responsibilities does a government have to protect its citizens who choose to live on foreign soil? Do those responsibilities change depending on whether or not those citizens engage in peaceful protest against a foreign government? If there is no actual legal obligation for a government to protect its citizens abroad, does it have some moral obligation? Whether it is a moral or legal obligation, is it right that such protection comes with a price tag?
Many Americans have been disappointed by the lack of guidance and assistance offered by the Embassy here. No one from the Embassy ever called me, despite the fact that I am registered with them. Not knowing I was receiving Cairo Warden emails from the Embassy (proving I was registered), due to the Internet blackout, I had my mom re-register me. To complete my re-registration, the State Department sent me an EMAIL with a link I had to click and enter a code (HELLO – NO INTERNET). After 48 hours of me not entering the code I didn’t know about, they canceled the re-registration request (which turned out not to matter because I was already registered, they just weren’t calling me because they’re lame). No safe transportation was provided to the airport and I’ve heard reports of roadblocks on the way where foreigners trying to leave are first robbed. Even if you can get an evac flight, you are sent to the “safehaven” (and the safety of these places is debatable at best) cities of Nicosia, Istanbul, or Athens (no choice where you’re sent) and must provide your own accommodation or transportation from there, at your own cost, in addition to reimbursing the State Department for your evacuation at two to three times the commercial rate. No pets allowed, even as carry-on luggage.
The president apparently admitted to ABC today that he is fed up with being president and would like to step down but fears that if he does, Egypt will descend into chaos. I didn’t see the interview but if that is accurate, it is a surprisingly frank admission from what I have believed this whole time is basically a stubborn octogenarian blinded by his pride and his advisors (who supposedly keep a lot from him) to the reality unfolding in his country.
Officially, the two sides have come to a stalemate, as the VP declared the government will not negotiate as long as the protests continue and the protesters will not leave until Mubarak steps down. If Mubarak is making admissions in the foreign media about wanting to leave office, perhaps he is trying to soften his landing a bit but the crackdown by government forces yesterday, the continued non-intervention of the military or police to protect peaceful citizens, the stoppage of supplies into Tahrir by government lackeys and the sanctioned hunting of journalists and demonizing of foreigners weighs against the likelihood that he is preparing for a graceful exit. If he is, judging from the continued rage and frustration of the Egyptians I’ve heard from, he really shouldn’t take his time. If tomorrow’s protests are as big as Tuesday’s, or even as big as last Friday’s, he could be chased out before he has time to leave on his own.
If he’s not planning to leave on his own, his terror tactics are weighing against him in the court of international opinion.
10:46pm
Hillary is slamming the attacks on the peaceful protesters, foreigners, and journalists now and she totally called out the army for sitting on its ass while people were attacked around them. She fell back on the “immediately begin negotiations for a peaceful and orderly transition.” It isn’t enough to demand that negotiations begin immediately. The transition needs to begin immediately or those people on Tahrir are not going home. Sigh. That was disappointing.
The Health Minister says that 13 people were killed in yesterday’s fighting and some 1200 were injured.
Middle class Iraqis who had taken refuge in Egypt during the war are fleeing Cairo and returning to Iraq in search of security and stability. Yikes.
So it was a big day in the news but one of the most boring days so far in Zamalek. In the wise words of my friend Dalia, “this is what unemployment felt like.” Only with the caveat that unemployment comes with a little tingle of guilt like it is somehow your fault. This at least doesn’t feel like that. But there is a sense I should be doing more with my days, which is difficult when the day officially ends at five. I am going to make a better effort to exercise each day, in addition to my two half-hour dog walks and finish some projects I promised I’d do for my mom but haven’t been able to work on without Internet. Of course with the restoration of Internet, I’ve caught up on my TV shows, but it is time I buckled down and did some work too. Now that I am used to watching TV for 12-14 hours a day it will be hard to work anything else into my schedule but after 10 days, maybe some variation in my routine will be good for me.
The helicopters have been circling non-stop today but otherwise the streets are quiet. I can smell burning trash from the campfires warming the neighborhood watch groups (who I neglected to make banana bread tonight – hopefully tonight will be uneventful!) but I associate that smell with the burn barrel of one of my babysitters when I was little and would strike out on my own into the woods during the day to explore. It is the smell of adventure!
Thanks to those of you who continue to write and call. It is nice to hear from home and reeaaally nice to break up the monotony. Good luck with this year's snowpocalypse!
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Revolt! February 2, 2011
February 2, 2011
1:16pm
I told my friend Dena last night that the surefire way to undermine the protests now would be to restore Internet service and let the protesters eat each other alive in the blogs and chat rooms, bickering about whether this latest concession goes far enough. Sure enough, we have Internet back today and there is a lot more debate in the streets about whether the protests should continue. Many people who aren’t participating and therefore aren’t getting a daily dose of patriotism and camaraderie at the rallies are getting tired of the curfew, tense from being cooped up and the pressure of having to provide for their families with limited cash supplies and no work. There will start to be more infighting soon between the opposition factions and it will be up to the organizers to hold it all together. I hope they do, otherwise we’ll have to go through this all again in September when Mubarak decides to run for reelection.
I heard this morning that around 300 have been killed across Egypt so far
4:54
Well, it has been a sad and exciting afternoon. A few hours ago, a horde of camel and horseback riding thugs rode through the military roadblock and began attacking the protesters in Tahrir Square. The two sides began throwing rocks at one another. Many people fled and many others were carried away with wounds from rocks. The army is trying to provide a cordon between the protesters and the attackers with tanks but is not able or willing to actively restore calm. The noise is incredible and clearly audible from my balcony.
The international news media keeps referring to them as “pro-Mubarak supporters,” which does not seem to be accurate. Possibly some of them are politically motivated, but the protesters are pulling the IDs off of the ones who started the attack and showing the cameras that these are security forces in plainclothes. The TV stations know this and reported this but instead of calling these guys “security forces,” or “hired thugs,” or “government forces,” etc., they keep calling them “Mubarak supporters.” I think that gives a really skewed view of what is happening. This is not a popular counter-protest movement, this is an attack by the government on the peaceful protesters and should be reported as such. This is very disappointing.
It appears from CNN’s coverage that Anderson Cooper has arrived in Cairo. This is the closest I have ever been to Anderson Cooper. Curfew just started so I suppose it is a bad time to go looking for him…maybe tomorrow…
I wonder if both sides will stop to pray at the evening call to prayer.
Life in Zamalek continues to be uneventful. I made a different kind of chicken soup today. I walked the dog twice again. Internet is back, at least temporarily, so most people I know have stayed home answering concerned emails of friends and family. I am immensely appreciative to be back in contact with the rest of the world but I am really disappointed that the police and the military are doing nothing to bring peace back to the protests in Tahrir and concerned about what will happen after dark. I am feeling cabin fever more than ever and my cold has moved into my chest so I will probably go to bed early. However, I am afraid that once darkness falls and the cameras don’t have so great a view, the government forces will start using live fire. Even if it is jus tear gas and rubber bullets again, I imagine the gunfire will make sleep difficult.
My neighbors have invited me over for dinner in a few hours. I hope they have wine. It has been a stressful afternoon.
1:16pm
I told my friend Dena last night that the surefire way to undermine the protests now would be to restore Internet service and let the protesters eat each other alive in the blogs and chat rooms, bickering about whether this latest concession goes far enough. Sure enough, we have Internet back today and there is a lot more debate in the streets about whether the protests should continue. Many people who aren’t participating and therefore aren’t getting a daily dose of patriotism and camaraderie at the rallies are getting tired of the curfew, tense from being cooped up and the pressure of having to provide for their families with limited cash supplies and no work. There will start to be more infighting soon between the opposition factions and it will be up to the organizers to hold it all together. I hope they do, otherwise we’ll have to go through this all again in September when Mubarak decides to run for reelection.
I heard this morning that around 300 have been killed across Egypt so far
4:54
Well, it has been a sad and exciting afternoon. A few hours ago, a horde of camel and horseback riding thugs rode through the military roadblock and began attacking the protesters in Tahrir Square. The two sides began throwing rocks at one another. Many people fled and many others were carried away with wounds from rocks. The army is trying to provide a cordon between the protesters and the attackers with tanks but is not able or willing to actively restore calm. The noise is incredible and clearly audible from my balcony.
The international news media keeps referring to them as “pro-Mubarak supporters,” which does not seem to be accurate. Possibly some of them are politically motivated, but the protesters are pulling the IDs off of the ones who started the attack and showing the cameras that these are security forces in plainclothes. The TV stations know this and reported this but instead of calling these guys “security forces,” or “hired thugs,” or “government forces,” etc., they keep calling them “Mubarak supporters.” I think that gives a really skewed view of what is happening. This is not a popular counter-protest movement, this is an attack by the government on the peaceful protesters and should be reported as such. This is very disappointing.
It appears from CNN’s coverage that Anderson Cooper has arrived in Cairo. This is the closest I have ever been to Anderson Cooper. Curfew just started so I suppose it is a bad time to go looking for him…maybe tomorrow…
I wonder if both sides will stop to pray at the evening call to prayer.
Life in Zamalek continues to be uneventful. I made a different kind of chicken soup today. I walked the dog twice again. Internet is back, at least temporarily, so most people I know have stayed home answering concerned emails of friends and family. I am immensely appreciative to be back in contact with the rest of the world but I am really disappointed that the police and the military are doing nothing to bring peace back to the protests in Tahrir and concerned about what will happen after dark. I am feeling cabin fever more than ever and my cold has moved into my chest so I will probably go to bed early. However, I am afraid that once darkness falls and the cameras don’t have so great a view, the government forces will start using live fire. Even if it is jus tear gas and rubber bullets again, I imagine the gunfire will make sleep difficult.
My neighbors have invited me over for dinner in a few hours. I hope they have wine. It has been a stressful afternoon.
Revolt! Jan 28 - Feb 1
January 28, 2011
1:45am
OMG the Internet is down!!! I’m sure they’ve done it to protect “national security” or some such but what the regime has actually done is severely limited my ability to stream and download this week’s new TV shows tomorrow. I feel affronted somehow, because I am not even protesting. I am willing to sacrifice supporting my Egyptian friends and sit on my butt protecting my work visa and all I ask in return is this week’s episode of The Mentalist. Is that too much?! And 30 Rock. It is just a half-hour show! Really, Mubarak, really?
Phones are supposed to go down too, which will leave me disconnected from everyone marching into battle after noon prayers tomorrow. As an apartment on the other side of the bridge from the chaos, I wanted to offer support from behind the lines tomorrow by keeping track of everyone’s last known location, health, etc. in case anyone gets injured or arrested. However, without phone, Internet, or BBM (BBM, Mubarak, really?!), The Mentalist and I can’t keep track of Black Swan’s reviews, much less the situation in Downtown Cairo.
No gunfire tonight. It is tense and quiet. The calm before the storm. Tomorrow will be huge. And unless I find a local news station on my Emirati satellite carrier (which will no doubt be all in Arabic), I will miss out on everything…including The Mentalist.
10:15am
Just got back in from my morning walk with the dog. The protests are planned for after the noon prayers so I thought I’d better get some last minute shopping done, get at least one walk in for Whiskey today, and withdraw some cash before the craziness starts.
Friday mornings aren’t usually very busy in Egypt, as families spend time together at home before noon prayers and many businesses don’t usually open until around 2pm anyway so it was difficult to tell if things are quieter than usual this morning. There certainly wasn’t much traffic but taxis were out and working and I wasn’t the only one running some last minute errands. However, most of the people out and about this morning were men and could be classified into four categories: men serving tea, men drinking tea, men observing others drink tea (police), and men secretly observing others drink tea (secret police – who, in their grandma sweaters and waist-length khaki jackets are not really that secret).
My phone providers for my personal cell and my work cell went down sometime last night or this morning because when I woke up at 9, I had no signal. The government is no longer just blocking certain websites or certain services (i.e. texting and BBM), but rather it has terminated all communications networks in an effort to discourage and disrupt the protests. However, late yesterday afternoon and through the evening, an email made its way through the online community announcing the planned gathering times and places in preparation for the expected communications shutdowns. Similar shutdowns had occurred in Iran after their elections, and recently in Tunisia, so the organizers of the demonstrations wanted to get the word out early. It was possibly in an attempt to halt the spread of this email that the web block went into effect last night. My guess is it was too late and everyone either knows where to go or knows someone who knows.
The biggest danger of the phones being down is that friends who meet at the protests won’t be able to find each other once there (how did we ever meet one another in large public spaces before the advent of cell phones?!) and friends who get separated won’t be able to find one another. More annoying for me is that I won’t be able to keep track of my friends’ locations on a map as I’d planned to do as my meager contribution to their efforts.
I bought a bunch of long-lasting root veggies like carrots and potatoes and some yogurt, eggs, and canned food in case it isn’t safe to leave my apartment for a few days. I had already stocked up on water and toilet paper. I am going to bake some banana bread just to have on hand in case any of my friends find their way to Zamalek, which is going to be one of the only protest-free neighborhoods today. I asked a Communist protester yesterday what I could expect in Z-town today and he answered, “empty streets.” The emptier the better, I’d say.
12:27pm
Prayers are going on now. On Friday there is the call to prayer, then the equivalent of a sermon, both of which are piped through loudspeakers. Each mosque must be within hearing distance of those around it so that there is no one the call to prayer does not reach. There is a mosque on the street that runs alongside the building next to mine, a stone’s throw from my balcony so it is actually quite loud. Thankfully, in October they replaced the guy who used to do the call to prayer with someone significantly more skilled and the whole experience is much less grating than it used to be.
I cannot understand the sermon. I wonder if the imams are supportive of the protests or supportive of the government and I wonder if they have the courage to discuss the issue, even to encourage peace or condemn violence in vague terms, knowing their congregations have no doubt been infiltrated by police today.
BBC and Al Jazeera English have correspondents on the ground in Cairo and Suez but coverage has been spotty – only like a minute or two every hour spent on this story. I can’t fault them really, because so far nothing is happening but I hope they go to that story more and the “Nelson Mandela isn’t that sick” story less as the day goes on and the action picks up. Without Internet access, I’m reliant on the international news providers to tell me what specifically is going on but I think I will be able to guess at the level of violence as I expect the shooting to start again soon across the river.
I think I can tell the difference in sound between rubber bullets and live ammunition by now, just in the way the sound carries. The sound of live ammo, which so far I have only heard at night, has a sound like a whip cracking against the sky itself. I heard it last night but there is no way to tell if the shots were aimed at protesters, in the air as warning shots, or shot by protesters themselves into the air or off their balconies at home in excitement. I did a load of laundry this morning and I am worried that when I hang it out of my balcony to dry it will smell like gunpowder by the end of the day. I swear I never had such concerns in Oregon!
1:55pm
Al Jazeera is showing footage of the 6th of October Bridge at the point it crosses the Nile. It is a major thoroughfare connecting the young, middle class neighborhood of Mohandiseen, on the far side of Zamalek to the upper middle class and majority Coptic neighborhood of Heliopolis about 40 minutes away on the other side of the city. There are quite a lot of people running back and forth like they may being fired upon but it isn’t clear what is happening.
Mohammed El Baradei has been arrested, which Al Jazeera is calling a brash move by the government but in my opinion it is pretty smart. There will be a bit of an international backlash for this move but nowhere near what would have happened had El Baradei been injured or killed participating in the protests. People would have gone bonkers.
Seven people have died across Egypt since the protests began on Tuesday.
3:00pm
I am extremely grateful for Al Jazeera’s consistent coverage of Egypt throughout the afternoon. BBC and CNN have focused more on Mandela’s release from the hospital, much to my disappointment.
Al Jazeera has been playing a limited cycle of footage over and over but the video they do have makes it clear that although the protests have started in different areas of the city they are moving into Tahrir Square. The security services were supposed to have blocked off Tahrir but they’ve either given way or been overwhelmed by the crowd.
I could hear a group of what sounded like maybe 20 people on one of the main thoroughfares in Zamalek near my apartment. I couldn’t understand what they were chanting and I have no idea why they’re here when the center of the action is so far away. I couldn’t see them from my balcony but I am charging my camera just in case they come by the section of the street I can see.
The religious component of the protests is interesting. Although the footage of Tuesday and Wednesday’s protest showed people shouting “Get out Mubarak” and “Down with the regime,” today’s footage has included a lot more “Allahu Akbar.” I don’t know if this is because the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t involved in the first couple days of protest but they’ve finally climbed on board today or if there actually is something fundamentally different about today’s crowd.
Some Egyptian Christians have told Al Jazeera that when the Muslims must stop protesting for the afternoon prayer (which is going on as type this), they will protect their fellow protesters regardless of religion. Apparently this protection is necessary because as Noor Ayman Noor is explaining on TV now, his father, Ayman Noor, one of the most prominent opposition leaders, was struck in the head with a rock after he stopped protesting to pray. He was taken to intensive care at a Cairo hospital. I am looking at live footage of the protesters who have stopped on the 6th of October Bridge to pray. That group at least appears to be left alone. Some of the wide angle shots of the Nile in the background, a cloud of black smoke on the bridge mid-frame and more than twenty rows of protestors lined shoulder to shoulder and head to toe in prayer are pretty breathtaking.
Two women are reported killed in the violence.
Honestly, CNN is in its fourth hour of reporting on Nelson Mandela’s health. Bearing in mind that he has been released from the hospital and said to be recovering, I’m not sure what there is left to report on. I’m wondering if CNN just doesn’t have enough people on the ground in Cairo to cover the story.
5:55
At 5:28, Al Jazeera announced that the government was demanding a 6:00pm curfew. I took the dog out for one last walk in Zamalek. The streets were quiet but my doorman and one of the garage attendants from the building next door saw me with Whiskey and said that there had been shooting in Zamalek and that it wasn’t safe for me to walk around. My neighbor, who I have seen around, had also left at the same time to walk his dog and offered to walk with me and Whiskey long enough for both dogs to work out some of their adrenaline.
There was no traffic but sundown prayers finished at the same time we got to the main street and people were walking back from the mosque and leaving work to get back home before curfew. These were not protestors and I saw no police (except a few guys in sweaters and jackets who may have been secret police or may have just been cold). My neighbor, who I have only met a couple times, when he realized I’m by myself tonight, told me where his apartment was and said that if I need anything, he and his wife would help me however they could. What a nice guy. He even volunteered the help of his neighbors (Labrador owners, so obviously good people) if he and his wife weren’t home for some reason.
I got back home just as Egyptian armed forces trucks drove up 6th of October Bridge into Al Jazeera’s camera view near the Ramsis Hilton. Mubarak plans to address the country soon and in the meantime has ordered the Army onto the streets to help the police enforce the curfew. The people have been chanting “Where is the Army? Come and save us!” because in Tunisia the Army protected the protestors from the police. People are standing in the street to cheer and raise their hands in victory cheers at each Army truck that passes.
The curfew, I can tell you now, at 6:03, seems to be failing. I see police personnel carriers on fire and protestors almost dumped one into the Nile. There are still tens of thousands of people in Downtown, maybe hundreds of thousands across the country, and in Suez at least, the mob has totally dominated the police force.
The situation doesn’t look good for Cairo’s police right now. I see only protestors on the bridge. And tires and piles of trash on fire. And now an explosion in the cab of the truck they were trying to dump in the river and people cheering as it burns.
6:21pm
The National Democratic Party headquarters is on fire.
6:37pm
Police are firing live ammunition into the crowds Downtown.
7:19pm
I am underwhelmed by Hillary Clinton’s speech. I am glad the US has now apparently paused to consider Egyptian’s personal and political rights, as opposed to just valuing stability in the region. But I would have appreciated stronger language. Hopefully that’s going on behind closed doors. I am happy she gave a shout out to the communications blackout. Reconnect me to the world!
7:31pm
AP is reporting that protestors are storming the foreign ministry building and possibly also the television and radio building. I am concerned about so many fires starting downtown, since the buildings are old and very close together and Cairo’s fire department is non-existent. The Egyptian Museum is right in the area that’s on fire.
The fire and violence downtown and the breakdown in policing has me concerned about the eventual security of my island neighborhood. Whereas everyone Downtown is ignoring the curfew, no one in my neighborhood is. The streets are pitch dark and dead quiet except for the tear gas cannon fire and gunshots from across the bridge. Nonetheless, I can’t help but think what will happen in my largely upper-class, partly expat neighborhood if the police force completely breaks down. There are a lot of nice shops and expensive homes and I don’t want anyone to confuse my building with something worth looting.
I have prepared a “Go-Bag” ala Jason Bourne for Whiskey and me in case we have to make our way about ten minutes down the street to my friend’s hotel, which will have more security than my apartment, as well as a couple cars. I’m not sure how I’ll get Whiskey into the hotel but questions like that are why I withdrew a bunch of cash yesterday.
Want to know what goes into a go-bag? Passport, money (dollars and Egyptian pounds), phones (even though they’re not currently working), chargers, adapters, camera, video camera, 2 hard drives, laptop and charger, jewelry (in case I run out of money and still need to bribe people), change of clothes, running shoes (for running), Laughing Cow cheese that does not require refrigeration, a peppered salami (thanks, Millie!), canned beef that can double as dog food, jar of peanut butter that can double as dog or human food, six granola bars, three packets of instant oatmeal, travel-sized toiletries (it’s a girly go-bag), a small hammer (because you never know when you might need one).
7:48pm
An Egyptian-American photographer is reporting that Sangria, a bar directly across the river from my friend’s hotel apartment is on fire as well. That must be a spectacular view from my friend’s balcony but I can’t help but wonder why anybody would bother with lighting up a bar, which has zero political meaning and was undoubtedly totally empty at the time. Random.
8:23pm
The wind has changed and we can smell the gunpowder and the smoke from the fires. The smell is making Whiskey nervous. I don’t like the sounds. The shooting and explosions are closer. I can hear airplanes or maybe helicopters over the river that sound sometimes like they wander overhead. I can hear sirens but I don’t know if it is police, ambulance or fire trucks.
8:31pm
A very big, loud helicopter just flew directly overhead.
8:36pm
They are flying very low, buzzing my neighborhood, possibly as a way of turning around in their circuit over Downtown but maybe there are protesters in Zamalek now. From Al Jazeera’s view of 6th of October Bridge, there doesn’t seem to be that many people there anymore, meaning they’ve either all moved to the center of Downtown, in Tahrir Square, or they’ve moved in the other direction, toward me. There is still no noise or people outside though, so I think things may be winding down or moving away.
8:44pm
BBC confirms Military helicopters have been deployed over Cairo.
9:13pm
The Cairo Tower is a tall, narrow, cylindrical building with shops and restaurants and a viewpoint of all of Cairo at the top. I am sure it is closed tonight but the tiny lights that light up and turn off to make little patterns around the sides of the building are on. The light show includes ghostly ankhs, the ancient Egyptian symbol of eternal life, sliding around the building from top to bottom. The BBC is doing a very serious interview with a very serious Egyptian journalist on the roof of a building on the Downtown side and the tower is in the background. I keep getting distracted by the swirling ankhs. What idiot thought it would be a good idea to turn on the cheesy lightshow tonight of all nights?
9:30pm
I just heard an explosion simultaneously from my apartment and on Al Jazeera and Dan Nolan happened to be reporting from Cairo at the exact moment specifically describing the different gunfire sounds he was hearing. He said they thought those big explosions are just sound grenades meant to stun and disperse protesters. I hope he’s right!
9:56pm
CNN is reporting that protesters themselves are forming a human chain around the Egyptian Museum to prevent any possible looting.
10:14pm
Robert Gibbs has absolutely no ability to inspire confidence. He has clearly written out his lines ahead of time and yet doesn’t even deliver his pat answers with reassurance and resolve. Although props for again to the US for requesting that Egypt turn the Internet back on.
10:46pm
I just went out and stood on my balcony for a few minutes. The one that faces one of the bigger streets in Zamalek. I wanted to sort of assess the status of the protests’ effects on my area as a way of figuring out if it is an okay time to go to bed and what I can expect tomorrow morning. The man who runs the newsstand across the street is not there, but neither is the cop stationed next to the newsstand. Which sucks for the Algerian Embassy he is supposed to be protecting.
I saw a man limping home by the light of one of the few street lamps but maybe he wasn’t a protester. Maybe he was just a guy with a limp. Hard to tell in Egypt.
The smell has changed from the sort of sulfur smell of gunpowder to the smell of burning trash (I assume burning buildings smell much the same) but it isn’t overpowering and I can’t smell it indoors like I could for awhile. The sound grenades (or shooting, or explosions) have just started up again after having faded for awhile but they sound much farther away than they did about an hour ago.
The fruit stand on the side street I can see from my balcony was receiving a truckload of bananas. A small boy was perched on top of a BIG pile of banana branches on the back of a truck, handing them down to men below. I wonder if that happens every night.
It is a breezy night, which is unfortunate for a few reasons. First and foremost, the tree next to my building will scrape its branches loud and creepily across the outside of my bedroom wall all night and I am already on edge enough. Secondly, it will keep blowing the smoke around to neighborhoods that otherwise aren’t involved in the protests so there’s no way to avoid or get away from it. Okay when it is trash smoke but if it becomes teargas again that could be a problem. Finally, a windy night is bad for buildings on fire in a city full of priceless antiquities without a fire department.
11:03pm
Ben Wedemen of CNN says that the police have fallen back entirely and the Presidential Guard has taken up positions outside the foreign ministry, the Egyptian Museum, and the State TV building. He says there are no protests going on because there’s nothing to protest against since the police have left the streets (so who is shooting?). Al Jazeera is reporting that several top Egyptian businessmen and other influential figures have boarded a private jet and left the country.
11:16pm
Two fire trucks have arrived at the NDP headquarters to try to put out the fire. After the fire has completely gutted the building. Good luck with that.
11:19pm
Bed time!
January 29, 2011
2:18am
Whiskey woke me up in a terror and I thought for sure something crazy was going on. Apparently just after I went to bed, Mubarak addressed the country, ordered his ministers to resign, and agreed to name a new government. However, he claimed to be “on the side of the poor” and refused to step down. He noted that without the reforms of the last few years, these protests would not have been possible. This was not what got Whiskey’s attention, however. He agrees with me that there might be mice in my walls (in addition to the creepy tree scraping mentioned before) and wanted me to join him in barking at them. I was just feeling guilty about the noise when my neighbors upstairs decided to move their furniture by dragging it screechily across the floor (not the first time they’ve thoughts 2am would be a good time for this). And remember their floor is my ceiling.
The shooting has not let up significantly since I went to bed and I can smell the gunfire from my balcony again.
CNN for the first time has referenced the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is being held out by the regime as a “scarecrow.” That is, “if you allow a free and fair election we’ll wind up with an Islamist government in Egypt.” This is the first time I’ve heard CNN comment on the fact that that is a fear tactic without much truth to it, noting that the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t even get involved in this uprising until the second and third days of protests.
I also missed Obama’s speech (seriously, when’s a girl supposed to sleep around here?! I was away for like 3 hours). I hope someone replays it later in the day.
Protestors have re-filled the streets after the speech. There was just a low rumble that could have been an explosion or a burst of automatic machine gun fire.
Incredibly, BBC is replaying the press conference announcing Nelson Mandela is being released from the hospital. Do they realize he isn’t president of South Africa anymore? Can’t we discuss Nelson Mandela no longer having a respiratory infection tomorrow?
Al Jazeera is interviewing Egyptians in New Jersey who wish they could be here for this historic moment. Ahh, irony.
2:55am
Back to bed.
10:18am
My friend Amani just came over. I was really, really asleep when she came but I was so happy to see her. She’d been on the outside edge of the protests and got a little bit of tear gas but was otherwise fine. She watched a local mall across the river burn and get looted from her balcony on the 22nd floor of a Zamalek hotel.
4:08pm
Amani told me the streets were safe so I took Whiskey for a quick walk. I thought I should check in on a British coworker of mine who also lives in my neighborhood and has only been here since October so I stopped in at her apartment and found that not only had Amani had the same idea, but another coworker of ours who lives in Zamalek was also there.
Cell phones were up working again (I credit American pressure with this achievement so THANKS HILLARY) so I called my mom on Amani’s cell. It was the middle of the night in Oregon so my mom was relieved to hear from me but semi-conscious so we agreed to talk again later.
My friends and I decided to meet for coffee a half hour later so I ran home and got a quick shower and then met them at Amani’s hotel for lunch and coffee.
Around 1:30, the TV stations were reporting that there were more people on the streets at that time today than at the same time yesterday. This makes me think tonight will be bigger and more violent than last night.
When I got the word around 2:30 that the government had moved curfew up to 4pm from 6pm, I hurried home to walk the dog one more time. I also did a little more last minute grocery shopping when I saw that people were cleaning out the stores. I bought a kilo of potatoes, a kilo of bananas, some rice, flour (to make banana bread), garlic, and two whole chickens (I froze one). I had already bought all my canned food, bottled water, toilet paper, etc. in the last couple days so I am quite well-stocked for one apartment and a dog.
I talked to my friend Millie and asked her to reassure our friends that I am fine and explain that my neighborhood is outside of the combat zone.
On my way home from after the dog’s afternoon walk, the wife of the man who helped me walk the dog at curfew time yesterday called out to me from her balcony next to my apartment building and reminded me to call on them if I need anything. What sweet people. I will have to bring them a banana bread when the chaos dies down.
I spent the last few minutes before curfew calling around to my friends to get everyone’s landline numbers in case cell service goes down again. I called my mom again, and my grandma, to reassure everyone that I am still fine. I think it is likely a hysterical overreaction but I pulled a heavy piece of furniture across my door. It is so unlikely looters would ever come here, much less think my apartment is worth their time, but my friend lives in a compound far outside the city and said her neighborhood has some looting so I figured better safe than sorry.
CNN is reporting that Ahmed Ezz has resigned. He is a steel magnate who has had a stranglehold on a lot of the business sector for years, thanks to lucrative government contracts paid for in kickbacks. He is possibly disliked by the people on the streets as much or more than the President.
I am going to finally take a shower and then make some banana bread (enough to freeze), stew (enough to freeze), and a chicken (if I can figure out how long to cook it, I can’t believe the Internet still isn’t back up!). I feel like I should be taking some sort of action to prepare (for what, I don’t know) and cooking is kind of the only thing I can do from within my apartment. I’ll make things I can freeze anyway so nothing will go to waste if I wind up not needing to hunker down in my apartment for days.
6:28pm
Mubarak has appointed his intelligence chief as Vice President (which Egypt has not had since Mubarak took power nearly thirty years ago) and the former Aviation Minister (what’s that?) as Prime Minister. I am not at all hopeful that this will satisfy the protesters and, in fact, it doesn’t seem to have impacted them at all. However, it may inadvertently prevent a power vacuum if Mubarak does eventually step down, as there will already be someone in place with the Constitutional authority to govern. Eventually the people will demand someone fairly elected with no association with Mubarak but in the interim, having a VP could be a good thing for restoring some stability or at least staving off total chaos.
I am going to wash the dog.
The military helicopters are back.
7:44pm
There are rumors that looters and state-sponsored gangs of thugs are looting and vandalizing upscale neighborhoods. One of our secretaries who called to confirm we don’t have work tomorrow also confirmed that in her neighborhood, Heliopolis, which is an upper middle class mostly Christian neighborhood near the airport, this was the case. Another expat neighborhood, Maadi’s Road 9 has a lot of coffee shops and restaurants and supposedly the residents grabbed sticks and kitchen knives and formed gangs of their own and ran down to protect their property and businesses. Al Jazeera reported that these neighborhood watch style vigilantes were forming gangs throughout Cairo to protect their homes.
I went out to my balcony and although the street was quiet, a group of six or seven teenagers holding sticks and planks of wood walked past. They looked like middle class boys and so I think they must be the sons of shop owners and doormen who live in the area. Doormen are quite poor but they live in small apartments near the entryways of the buildings they protect so they have a personal interest in patrolling. We have a big metal gate in my apartment that is rarely closed but I imagine it is bolted today.
The military is supposedly sending reinforcements to the suburbs but I have not seen any troops or vehicles yet. I haven’t heard any traffic besides the helicopters in a long time.
Charlie Sheen checked into rehab again. Thanks CNN ticker!
9:12pm
I roasted my first chicken, thanks to all I learned watching Karen in my years in Madison. I used a garlic sauce my friend accidentally left here to make the spice rub, though, so it wasn’t a purely Wisconsin (or Ohio) recipe.
The streets of Zamalek are still relatively quiet but the quiet is broken every now and again by the scraping of a metal barricade (stolen from police by the residents and set up to block the street), the banging of metal, occasionally shouts (far off, thus far) and sometimes shots I can hear from far away. It is definitely not as quiet as yesterday. Yesterday all the people, the energy, the anger was focused on Tahrir and Downtown. Now that people have the idea of looting and vandalizing, the anger is spreading out from Downtown. Some of these guys work for the government. They are plainclothes police or otherwise state-hired thugs.
I want to hear the US government condemn the absence of police. The total withdrawal of police, rather than a piecemeal falling back from protest areas to residential areas in need of protection, indicates that the government has given an order to disperse the police. This is spiteful and immoral. It is a move that whines, “you don’t like the police? Fine, we’ll take them away.” The US needs to demand Mubarak return the police to the streets in a policing capacity, to protect the people and their property from looters. And privately, the US needs to demand he withdraw the looters on his payroll.
11:03pm
Just talked to Mom again. Having the phones back up is really a blessing but I have to conserve my minutes in case I can’t buy more tomorrow. If any of my friends in Zamalek learn of looting or any other danger, though, we can contact one another on our land lines. For now the odd sounds of the neighborhood watch groups getting settled and getting their adrenaline under control have faded and it is extremely quiet outside. There is little to no shooting or tear gas firing sounds coming from Downtown and it does seem that with the military in place the protests are finally relatively peaceful in the Central Cairo area. The number of people in Tahrir is down to a few thousand, which is much earlier than things wrapped up yesterday.
I just saw an interesting piece on Al Jazeera about the young people protecting their neighborhood in Nasser City, another upper middle class suburb about forty minutes out of the city center. The camera watches them make a few traffic stops on the side street that leads into their neighborhood (the army is checking the main thoroughfares but not the side streets). They surround a car they don’t recognize and wave weapons until it stops. Then they check the driver’s bita’a (national ID) and ask his business. Then they discuss it amongst themselves and determine whether or not to let the car pass, at which point it peacefully goes on its way. They are not acting like mobs, but rather as street police.
Almost all eyewitness reports in the media so far claim that the gangs of looters and vandals are police officers in civilian clothes.
12:35am
The news has been reporting the same stories for the last two hours. All is quiet on the Zamalek front. Time to read a bit and head to bed.
January 30, 2011
11:24am
I heard a couple shots last night around 3:45am that sounded like they might have come from 26th of July street, a few blocks away. The street was charred on the block closer to me than 26th of July when I took Whiskey for a walk this morning but my friend Joanne lives on that street and she didn’t call worried last night so I assume it must have been something innocuous like some burning trash or maybe firecrackers.
It is quiet on the streets, partly because today is a work day (though I finally got my snow day), but also because the guys who are usually hurrying around running errands in the morning are exhausted from patrolling the neighborhood all night. But people are still out washing cars, buying groceries and, in my case, going out for coffee.
The military is out but not really “in force.” I saw a group of about four guys protecting a government-owned grocery store, another three in front of a government building on 26th of July street and three more directing traffic at what isn’t even the biggest intersection (the police who normally direct traffic are still gone and the culture of obeying stop lights is unheard of here).
4:47pm
They are buzzing Cairo with military fighter jets to intimidate the crowds and enforce the curfew. Really they’re just scaring the crap out of the law abiding citizens (and law abiding dogs) who are already inside).
The helicopters are back as well. It’s smart, though. It creates the impression of a military presence without actually a lot of troops on the ground.
The Muslim Brotherhood backed Mohammed El Baradei to negotiate a transition with the government. This is a big deal because it shows a level of cooperation and trust within the opposition and a willingness to band together in a practical way to push things forward.
The former interior minister has been arrested by the Army.
Hillary said today that the US supports an orderly transition of power. This is the closest thing we’ve heard so far that could even be interpreted as support for the revolution. I wish they’d come down a little stronger on the Internet blackout issue and on the government encouraging violence and looting issue.
The American Embassy called my friend and told her the US was providing planes tomorrow morning to evacuate citizens. They haven’t called me or two other American friends and their phones have been unsurprisingly busy all day so I don’t know the details. I‘m not sure if a flight out would be free or if I’d have to buy a ticket. Frankly, I don’t really want to leave yet. I trust my neighborhood to protect me and I trust Egyptians to keep their anger focused on the President until he leaves. If El Baradei or even the new VP steps in at that point and returns the police to the streets and orders the gangs to stand down and requests aid to restock the grocery stores and TURNS ON THE INTERNET, we have a real shot at quick stability. I hope this happens soon because there are reports of food and fuel shortages.
Tonight is the second night of vigilante protection against government sponsored gangs of looters and vandals.
7:20pm
At the same time the American Embassy is recommending evacuation, all European embassies are recommending against it. Thanks guys.
8:35pm
Carmen, my friend Dena’s roommate, who has only been in Egypt for less than three weeks, would have been home by herself tonight since Dena is at her grandpa’s in Heliopolis and their other roommate is staying overnight at the Dutch Institute. Their part of the neighborhood saw a little more action than mine last night so she asked to stay with me tonight. We had some spaghetti and vodka lemonade and watched the news for a few hours but I think we’re both about done for the day. I got a bit of a sore throat earlier and I think it is turning into a cold so I am going to read a bit, then go to bed early.
January 31, 2011
8:16pm
Long, busy day. I got up to walk the dog at ten and picked up a bunch of groceries. I am definitely sick so I hit the pharmacy too and stocked up.
Amani and I were going to meet for coffee but none of the coffee shops were open so we walked around and did my grocery shopping together. I stocked up on some more water and refilled a bunch of old water bottles with tap water in case they turn the tap water off, as was rumored today.
Amani had the idea to go to a public park that overlooks Qasr el Nil Bridge, which connects Zamalek to Tahrir Square and is one of the main arteries for the protesters. Today wasn’t even supposed to be a big protest day. The organizers asked for a general strike today and told everyone go home and rest in anticipation of tomorrow’s “Million Man March” from Tahrir to the presidential palace in Heliopolis. (in response to this news, I had two thoughts: first, isn’t the president in Sharm El Sheikh?! Second: that is a loooooong way to march!) Despite today being kind of a down day, our visit to the park was exciting because there were actually a huge number of people marching and chanting on their way to Tahrir. They are apparently planning to spend the whole night. The military is building blockades to prevent people from entering the square so when the protesters heard this they decided to go the night before, before the blockades could be completed, and just stay until tomorrow. Like American Idol tryouts.
The police are back on the street tonight, though not in their usual numbers. I can see a cop at his post out my balcony. I’m not sure if I feel safer having him there or not. I heard a siren (haven’t heard that in a while!) and shots but otherwise Zamalek has been quiet since curfew today at 3pm.
I got to talk to Millie and Jill tonight. I was going kind of stir crazy so it was really nice to talk to people who have something else to do in their lives besides grocery shop and think about Egyptian politics. I am going to go even crazier tomorrow as they’ve moved the curfew up again. We are all supposed to be indoors for the night by 1pm tomorrow. I already have a dog walking date lined up with my neighbor to break curfew. The little critters just can’t stay cooped up for so long. They’re not the only ones.
I just watched an emotional interview on Al Jazeera with Salma El Tarzi, an activist in Tahrir right now. The picture she painted of the protest was inspiring. When asked how people were getting the food, water, and supplies they needed to sustain the protest while the banks were closed. She said “The people who have money are buying food for the people who don’t have, I’ve never been more full in my life because someone is always here offering a bottle of water, a biscuit or a sandwich.” She said that she’d never seen Egyptians so civilized to one another and that perhaps it is because they never felt the country belonged to them but now that they feel they’ve taken it back they feel a responsibility to behave. She said they are setting examples for one another, “You stop to pick up a piece of trash and then you look around and everyone is picking up the trash.” This echoes what Amani said of Tahrir yesterday, which is that everyone is picking up their own garbage and that the square, which is usually quite dirty even when the state is functioning normally, is “spotless.” Wouldn’t it be amazing if Egypt transformed itself into a nation where all its citizens feed one another and no one litters?!
I have heard the phones will be shut off again soon so I am going to try to call home one more time. Then, to bed!
February 1, 2011
3:17pm
Curfew was at 1pm today though enough people thought it was at 3:00 that it essentially was. I walked the dog a couple times and got more banana bread making materials. I went for coffee with my nice neighbors and they offered to cut me in on their backup plan, “like an adopted daughter.” They have a place in a compound out by Hurghada on the Red Sea where they and some friends who also have pets they don’t want to leave alone in Egypt are planning to head if they feel like it is no longer safe in Cairo. They have their three Jeeps gassed up and loaded with water and extra fuel and I am welcome to come. Sounds like a nice vacation, actually. I hope they invite me sometime when the world isn’t in utter chaos.
I haven’t heard the helicopters much today, which makes me think the military really is standing by their word to leave the protesters alone. I am going to tentatively walk the dog toward the bridges today on my side of the Nile in a few hours to see if I can see or hear anything interesting. My guess is the police or the army or the neighborhood guys will stop me before I get there and tell me to go home but it is worth a shot.
3:52pm
Al Jazeera is estimating 2 million people are demonstrating in and around Tahrir Square. That is one-tenth of Cairo’s population.
According to my friend Dena, state TV has been playing patriotic songs and showed a half-hour tour of King Farouk’s palace. They’re showing food deliveries, people at work and peaceful shots of the Nile. Basically they’re putting the camera on every location possible except Tahrir to “prove” to Egyptians that life is going on as normal.
7:30pm
I walked down the Corniche, the wide boulevard along the Nile, on the Zamalek side, with my neighbor, Don, and his dog, Chippy. People were ebbing across the bridges in both directions and the group surrounding the Interior Ministry started singing the national anthem just as we were passing parallel to it on the other side of the Nile.
We could wander around the streets as we pleased since there is basically no traffic. It was great to be able to walk in the middle of roads we usually can’t even spring across.
The two of us with our dogs must have looked pretty innocuous because even though we were breaking curfew by several hours no one stopped us until we were coming back into Zamalek, when a young boy with a kuffeya around his neck carrying a broom handle came over and politely asked us what street we lived on, I guess as a quiz to see if we really lived in Zamalek. We both live on a very obscure street so he knew we really were locals.
We met an Egyptian girl on her way back home to Zamalek after spending six hours standing and chanting in the square. She seemed exhausted but elated and very positive about how kind everyone was to each other in the protests and hopeful about the future. She is a single mom.
I made another loaf of banana bread and brewed a pot of tea for my neighborhood watch. My bawab (doorman) asked for cigarettes to go with it since that is the first thing to have sold out and not be replenished in Zamalek but of course I couldn’t help him out.
CNN just showed a poster someone is holding in Tahrir saying “Yes We Can TOO”. Awesome.
9:11pm
The hilarious activist Salma Tarzi just explained to CNN that Mubarak’s proposal that neither he nor Gamal will run in the next election is not enough and that until he steps down the protesters will stay in Tahrir. She said they’ve set up a soccer tournament that will run for three days as they assume they will be there at least three days and they’ve invited the military to participate in the tournament “and they quite liked the idea.”
If Mubarak really does say that he and Gamal won’t run in the next election it will be a big concession but I doubt it will be enough. It is too late. Those people aren’t going home.
Al Jazeera is reporting that “there is no clear sign of one individual who the protesters would recognize and name as their chosen leader.” They’re acting like this is a defect of some kind. I think this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what these people are out there for. Their whole point is that they are multidimensional, from all religions and walks of life and they want a government that represents them, in that they want a complex, multiparty system, rather than a fake representative system where the NDP holds 97% of the seats in parliament, yet represents none of the people. Al Jazeera said the people are clear about who they want out but not clear about who they want in…because they don’t want a new president, they want new presidential ELECTIONS. They want to be courted by candidates for once. They want to be allowed to vote without intimidation and they want their vote to count. To me those demands are much more complex and touching on a human level than a demand for a particular person would be.
11:10pm
Mubarak just announced on state TV that he will not run for a second term. He said the protests were started “by honest youths and men” but had been “manipulated by political forces”. He emphasized the thieves and arsonists who had taken advantage of the lack of security and called on the police force to restore security while respecting rights and dignity (he used the word dignity about a million times in the speech). He called on parliament to amend the articles of the Constitution to limit the term(s) of the president and he said he would happily pass the banner over to the next president at the end of this term. He said he will “die on the soil of Egypt.” That doesn’t bode well.
The crowd in Tahrir is chanting “Leave! Leave!” and “Not Enough! Not Enough,” and “By Friday afternoon we will be at the Presidential Palace!”
It seems as if you stomp on your people for nearly 30 years they will have the tenacity to stomp on you for quite a long time in return.
1:45am
OMG the Internet is down!!! I’m sure they’ve done it to protect “national security” or some such but what the regime has actually done is severely limited my ability to stream and download this week’s new TV shows tomorrow. I feel affronted somehow, because I am not even protesting. I am willing to sacrifice supporting my Egyptian friends and sit on my butt protecting my work visa and all I ask in return is this week’s episode of The Mentalist. Is that too much?! And 30 Rock. It is just a half-hour show! Really, Mubarak, really?
Phones are supposed to go down too, which will leave me disconnected from everyone marching into battle after noon prayers tomorrow. As an apartment on the other side of the bridge from the chaos, I wanted to offer support from behind the lines tomorrow by keeping track of everyone’s last known location, health, etc. in case anyone gets injured or arrested. However, without phone, Internet, or BBM (BBM, Mubarak, really?!), The Mentalist and I can’t keep track of Black Swan’s reviews, much less the situation in Downtown Cairo.
No gunfire tonight. It is tense and quiet. The calm before the storm. Tomorrow will be huge. And unless I find a local news station on my Emirati satellite carrier (which will no doubt be all in Arabic), I will miss out on everything…including The Mentalist.
10:15am
Just got back in from my morning walk with the dog. The protests are planned for after the noon prayers so I thought I’d better get some last minute shopping done, get at least one walk in for Whiskey today, and withdraw some cash before the craziness starts.
Friday mornings aren’t usually very busy in Egypt, as families spend time together at home before noon prayers and many businesses don’t usually open until around 2pm anyway so it was difficult to tell if things are quieter than usual this morning. There certainly wasn’t much traffic but taxis were out and working and I wasn’t the only one running some last minute errands. However, most of the people out and about this morning were men and could be classified into four categories: men serving tea, men drinking tea, men observing others drink tea (police), and men secretly observing others drink tea (secret police – who, in their grandma sweaters and waist-length khaki jackets are not really that secret).
My phone providers for my personal cell and my work cell went down sometime last night or this morning because when I woke up at 9, I had no signal. The government is no longer just blocking certain websites or certain services (i.e. texting and BBM), but rather it has terminated all communications networks in an effort to discourage and disrupt the protests. However, late yesterday afternoon and through the evening, an email made its way through the online community announcing the planned gathering times and places in preparation for the expected communications shutdowns. Similar shutdowns had occurred in Iran after their elections, and recently in Tunisia, so the organizers of the demonstrations wanted to get the word out early. It was possibly in an attempt to halt the spread of this email that the web block went into effect last night. My guess is it was too late and everyone either knows where to go or knows someone who knows.
The biggest danger of the phones being down is that friends who meet at the protests won’t be able to find each other once there (how did we ever meet one another in large public spaces before the advent of cell phones?!) and friends who get separated won’t be able to find one another. More annoying for me is that I won’t be able to keep track of my friends’ locations on a map as I’d planned to do as my meager contribution to their efforts.
I bought a bunch of long-lasting root veggies like carrots and potatoes and some yogurt, eggs, and canned food in case it isn’t safe to leave my apartment for a few days. I had already stocked up on water and toilet paper. I am going to bake some banana bread just to have on hand in case any of my friends find their way to Zamalek, which is going to be one of the only protest-free neighborhoods today. I asked a Communist protester yesterday what I could expect in Z-town today and he answered, “empty streets.” The emptier the better, I’d say.
12:27pm
Prayers are going on now. On Friday there is the call to prayer, then the equivalent of a sermon, both of which are piped through loudspeakers. Each mosque must be within hearing distance of those around it so that there is no one the call to prayer does not reach. There is a mosque on the street that runs alongside the building next to mine, a stone’s throw from my balcony so it is actually quite loud. Thankfully, in October they replaced the guy who used to do the call to prayer with someone significantly more skilled and the whole experience is much less grating than it used to be.
I cannot understand the sermon. I wonder if the imams are supportive of the protests or supportive of the government and I wonder if they have the courage to discuss the issue, even to encourage peace or condemn violence in vague terms, knowing their congregations have no doubt been infiltrated by police today.
BBC and Al Jazeera English have correspondents on the ground in Cairo and Suez but coverage has been spotty – only like a minute or two every hour spent on this story. I can’t fault them really, because so far nothing is happening but I hope they go to that story more and the “Nelson Mandela isn’t that sick” story less as the day goes on and the action picks up. Without Internet access, I’m reliant on the international news providers to tell me what specifically is going on but I think I will be able to guess at the level of violence as I expect the shooting to start again soon across the river.
I think I can tell the difference in sound between rubber bullets and live ammunition by now, just in the way the sound carries. The sound of live ammo, which so far I have only heard at night, has a sound like a whip cracking against the sky itself. I heard it last night but there is no way to tell if the shots were aimed at protesters, in the air as warning shots, or shot by protesters themselves into the air or off their balconies at home in excitement. I did a load of laundry this morning and I am worried that when I hang it out of my balcony to dry it will smell like gunpowder by the end of the day. I swear I never had such concerns in Oregon!
1:55pm
Al Jazeera is showing footage of the 6th of October Bridge at the point it crosses the Nile. It is a major thoroughfare connecting the young, middle class neighborhood of Mohandiseen, on the far side of Zamalek to the upper middle class and majority Coptic neighborhood of Heliopolis about 40 minutes away on the other side of the city. There are quite a lot of people running back and forth like they may being fired upon but it isn’t clear what is happening.
Mohammed El Baradei has been arrested, which Al Jazeera is calling a brash move by the government but in my opinion it is pretty smart. There will be a bit of an international backlash for this move but nowhere near what would have happened had El Baradei been injured or killed participating in the protests. People would have gone bonkers.
Seven people have died across Egypt since the protests began on Tuesday.
3:00pm
I am extremely grateful for Al Jazeera’s consistent coverage of Egypt throughout the afternoon. BBC and CNN have focused more on Mandela’s release from the hospital, much to my disappointment.
Al Jazeera has been playing a limited cycle of footage over and over but the video they do have makes it clear that although the protests have started in different areas of the city they are moving into Tahrir Square. The security services were supposed to have blocked off Tahrir but they’ve either given way or been overwhelmed by the crowd.
I could hear a group of what sounded like maybe 20 people on one of the main thoroughfares in Zamalek near my apartment. I couldn’t understand what they were chanting and I have no idea why they’re here when the center of the action is so far away. I couldn’t see them from my balcony but I am charging my camera just in case they come by the section of the street I can see.
The religious component of the protests is interesting. Although the footage of Tuesday and Wednesday’s protest showed people shouting “Get out Mubarak” and “Down with the regime,” today’s footage has included a lot more “Allahu Akbar.” I don’t know if this is because the Muslim Brotherhood wasn’t involved in the first couple days of protest but they’ve finally climbed on board today or if there actually is something fundamentally different about today’s crowd.
Some Egyptian Christians have told Al Jazeera that when the Muslims must stop protesting for the afternoon prayer (which is going on as type this), they will protect their fellow protesters regardless of religion. Apparently this protection is necessary because as Noor Ayman Noor is explaining on TV now, his father, Ayman Noor, one of the most prominent opposition leaders, was struck in the head with a rock after he stopped protesting to pray. He was taken to intensive care at a Cairo hospital. I am looking at live footage of the protesters who have stopped on the 6th of October Bridge to pray. That group at least appears to be left alone. Some of the wide angle shots of the Nile in the background, a cloud of black smoke on the bridge mid-frame and more than twenty rows of protestors lined shoulder to shoulder and head to toe in prayer are pretty breathtaking.
Two women are reported killed in the violence.
Honestly, CNN is in its fourth hour of reporting on Nelson Mandela’s health. Bearing in mind that he has been released from the hospital and said to be recovering, I’m not sure what there is left to report on. I’m wondering if CNN just doesn’t have enough people on the ground in Cairo to cover the story.
5:55
At 5:28, Al Jazeera announced that the government was demanding a 6:00pm curfew. I took the dog out for one last walk in Zamalek. The streets were quiet but my doorman and one of the garage attendants from the building next door saw me with Whiskey and said that there had been shooting in Zamalek and that it wasn’t safe for me to walk around. My neighbor, who I have seen around, had also left at the same time to walk his dog and offered to walk with me and Whiskey long enough for both dogs to work out some of their adrenaline.
There was no traffic but sundown prayers finished at the same time we got to the main street and people were walking back from the mosque and leaving work to get back home before curfew. These were not protestors and I saw no police (except a few guys in sweaters and jackets who may have been secret police or may have just been cold). My neighbor, who I have only met a couple times, when he realized I’m by myself tonight, told me where his apartment was and said that if I need anything, he and his wife would help me however they could. What a nice guy. He even volunteered the help of his neighbors (Labrador owners, so obviously good people) if he and his wife weren’t home for some reason.
I got back home just as Egyptian armed forces trucks drove up 6th of October Bridge into Al Jazeera’s camera view near the Ramsis Hilton. Mubarak plans to address the country soon and in the meantime has ordered the Army onto the streets to help the police enforce the curfew. The people have been chanting “Where is the Army? Come and save us!” because in Tunisia the Army protected the protestors from the police. People are standing in the street to cheer and raise their hands in victory cheers at each Army truck that passes.
The curfew, I can tell you now, at 6:03, seems to be failing. I see police personnel carriers on fire and protestors almost dumped one into the Nile. There are still tens of thousands of people in Downtown, maybe hundreds of thousands across the country, and in Suez at least, the mob has totally dominated the police force.
The situation doesn’t look good for Cairo’s police right now. I see only protestors on the bridge. And tires and piles of trash on fire. And now an explosion in the cab of the truck they were trying to dump in the river and people cheering as it burns.
6:21pm
The National Democratic Party headquarters is on fire.
6:37pm
Police are firing live ammunition into the crowds Downtown.
7:19pm
I am underwhelmed by Hillary Clinton’s speech. I am glad the US has now apparently paused to consider Egyptian’s personal and political rights, as opposed to just valuing stability in the region. But I would have appreciated stronger language. Hopefully that’s going on behind closed doors. I am happy she gave a shout out to the communications blackout. Reconnect me to the world!
7:31pm
AP is reporting that protestors are storming the foreign ministry building and possibly also the television and radio building. I am concerned about so many fires starting downtown, since the buildings are old and very close together and Cairo’s fire department is non-existent. The Egyptian Museum is right in the area that’s on fire.
The fire and violence downtown and the breakdown in policing has me concerned about the eventual security of my island neighborhood. Whereas everyone Downtown is ignoring the curfew, no one in my neighborhood is. The streets are pitch dark and dead quiet except for the tear gas cannon fire and gunshots from across the bridge. Nonetheless, I can’t help but think what will happen in my largely upper-class, partly expat neighborhood if the police force completely breaks down. There are a lot of nice shops and expensive homes and I don’t want anyone to confuse my building with something worth looting.
I have prepared a “Go-Bag” ala Jason Bourne for Whiskey and me in case we have to make our way about ten minutes down the street to my friend’s hotel, which will have more security than my apartment, as well as a couple cars. I’m not sure how I’ll get Whiskey into the hotel but questions like that are why I withdrew a bunch of cash yesterday.
Want to know what goes into a go-bag? Passport, money (dollars and Egyptian pounds), phones (even though they’re not currently working), chargers, adapters, camera, video camera, 2 hard drives, laptop and charger, jewelry (in case I run out of money and still need to bribe people), change of clothes, running shoes (for running), Laughing Cow cheese that does not require refrigeration, a peppered salami (thanks, Millie!), canned beef that can double as dog food, jar of peanut butter that can double as dog or human food, six granola bars, three packets of instant oatmeal, travel-sized toiletries (it’s a girly go-bag), a small hammer (because you never know when you might need one).
7:48pm
An Egyptian-American photographer is reporting that Sangria, a bar directly across the river from my friend’s hotel apartment is on fire as well. That must be a spectacular view from my friend’s balcony but I can’t help but wonder why anybody would bother with lighting up a bar, which has zero political meaning and was undoubtedly totally empty at the time. Random.
8:23pm
The wind has changed and we can smell the gunpowder and the smoke from the fires. The smell is making Whiskey nervous. I don’t like the sounds. The shooting and explosions are closer. I can hear airplanes or maybe helicopters over the river that sound sometimes like they wander overhead. I can hear sirens but I don’t know if it is police, ambulance or fire trucks.
8:31pm
A very big, loud helicopter just flew directly overhead.
8:36pm
They are flying very low, buzzing my neighborhood, possibly as a way of turning around in their circuit over Downtown but maybe there are protesters in Zamalek now. From Al Jazeera’s view of 6th of October Bridge, there doesn’t seem to be that many people there anymore, meaning they’ve either all moved to the center of Downtown, in Tahrir Square, or they’ve moved in the other direction, toward me. There is still no noise or people outside though, so I think things may be winding down or moving away.
8:44pm
BBC confirms Military helicopters have been deployed over Cairo.
9:13pm
The Cairo Tower is a tall, narrow, cylindrical building with shops and restaurants and a viewpoint of all of Cairo at the top. I am sure it is closed tonight but the tiny lights that light up and turn off to make little patterns around the sides of the building are on. The light show includes ghostly ankhs, the ancient Egyptian symbol of eternal life, sliding around the building from top to bottom. The BBC is doing a very serious interview with a very serious Egyptian journalist on the roof of a building on the Downtown side and the tower is in the background. I keep getting distracted by the swirling ankhs. What idiot thought it would be a good idea to turn on the cheesy lightshow tonight of all nights?
9:30pm
I just heard an explosion simultaneously from my apartment and on Al Jazeera and Dan Nolan happened to be reporting from Cairo at the exact moment specifically describing the different gunfire sounds he was hearing. He said they thought those big explosions are just sound grenades meant to stun and disperse protesters. I hope he’s right!
9:56pm
CNN is reporting that protesters themselves are forming a human chain around the Egyptian Museum to prevent any possible looting.
10:14pm
Robert Gibbs has absolutely no ability to inspire confidence. He has clearly written out his lines ahead of time and yet doesn’t even deliver his pat answers with reassurance and resolve. Although props for again to the US for requesting that Egypt turn the Internet back on.
10:46pm
I just went out and stood on my balcony for a few minutes. The one that faces one of the bigger streets in Zamalek. I wanted to sort of assess the status of the protests’ effects on my area as a way of figuring out if it is an okay time to go to bed and what I can expect tomorrow morning. The man who runs the newsstand across the street is not there, but neither is the cop stationed next to the newsstand. Which sucks for the Algerian Embassy he is supposed to be protecting.
I saw a man limping home by the light of one of the few street lamps but maybe he wasn’t a protester. Maybe he was just a guy with a limp. Hard to tell in Egypt.
The smell has changed from the sort of sulfur smell of gunpowder to the smell of burning trash (I assume burning buildings smell much the same) but it isn’t overpowering and I can’t smell it indoors like I could for awhile. The sound grenades (or shooting, or explosions) have just started up again after having faded for awhile but they sound much farther away than they did about an hour ago.
The fruit stand on the side street I can see from my balcony was receiving a truckload of bananas. A small boy was perched on top of a BIG pile of banana branches on the back of a truck, handing them down to men below. I wonder if that happens every night.
It is a breezy night, which is unfortunate for a few reasons. First and foremost, the tree next to my building will scrape its branches loud and creepily across the outside of my bedroom wall all night and I am already on edge enough. Secondly, it will keep blowing the smoke around to neighborhoods that otherwise aren’t involved in the protests so there’s no way to avoid or get away from it. Okay when it is trash smoke but if it becomes teargas again that could be a problem. Finally, a windy night is bad for buildings on fire in a city full of priceless antiquities without a fire department.
11:03pm
Ben Wedemen of CNN says that the police have fallen back entirely and the Presidential Guard has taken up positions outside the foreign ministry, the Egyptian Museum, and the State TV building. He says there are no protests going on because there’s nothing to protest against since the police have left the streets (so who is shooting?). Al Jazeera is reporting that several top Egyptian businessmen and other influential figures have boarded a private jet and left the country.
11:16pm
Two fire trucks have arrived at the NDP headquarters to try to put out the fire. After the fire has completely gutted the building. Good luck with that.
11:19pm
Bed time!
January 29, 2011
2:18am
Whiskey woke me up in a terror and I thought for sure something crazy was going on. Apparently just after I went to bed, Mubarak addressed the country, ordered his ministers to resign, and agreed to name a new government. However, he claimed to be “on the side of the poor” and refused to step down. He noted that without the reforms of the last few years, these protests would not have been possible. This was not what got Whiskey’s attention, however. He agrees with me that there might be mice in my walls (in addition to the creepy tree scraping mentioned before) and wanted me to join him in barking at them. I was just feeling guilty about the noise when my neighbors upstairs decided to move their furniture by dragging it screechily across the floor (not the first time they’ve thoughts 2am would be a good time for this). And remember their floor is my ceiling.
The shooting has not let up significantly since I went to bed and I can smell the gunfire from my balcony again.
CNN for the first time has referenced the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is being held out by the regime as a “scarecrow.” That is, “if you allow a free and fair election we’ll wind up with an Islamist government in Egypt.” This is the first time I’ve heard CNN comment on the fact that that is a fear tactic without much truth to it, noting that the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t even get involved in this uprising until the second and third days of protests.
I also missed Obama’s speech (seriously, when’s a girl supposed to sleep around here?! I was away for like 3 hours). I hope someone replays it later in the day.
Protestors have re-filled the streets after the speech. There was just a low rumble that could have been an explosion or a burst of automatic machine gun fire.
Incredibly, BBC is replaying the press conference announcing Nelson Mandela is being released from the hospital. Do they realize he isn’t president of South Africa anymore? Can’t we discuss Nelson Mandela no longer having a respiratory infection tomorrow?
Al Jazeera is interviewing Egyptians in New Jersey who wish they could be here for this historic moment. Ahh, irony.
2:55am
Back to bed.
10:18am
My friend Amani just came over. I was really, really asleep when she came but I was so happy to see her. She’d been on the outside edge of the protests and got a little bit of tear gas but was otherwise fine. She watched a local mall across the river burn and get looted from her balcony on the 22nd floor of a Zamalek hotel.
4:08pm
Amani told me the streets were safe so I took Whiskey for a quick walk. I thought I should check in on a British coworker of mine who also lives in my neighborhood and has only been here since October so I stopped in at her apartment and found that not only had Amani had the same idea, but another coworker of ours who lives in Zamalek was also there.
Cell phones were up working again (I credit American pressure with this achievement so THANKS HILLARY) so I called my mom on Amani’s cell. It was the middle of the night in Oregon so my mom was relieved to hear from me but semi-conscious so we agreed to talk again later.
My friends and I decided to meet for coffee a half hour later so I ran home and got a quick shower and then met them at Amani’s hotel for lunch and coffee.
Around 1:30, the TV stations were reporting that there were more people on the streets at that time today than at the same time yesterday. This makes me think tonight will be bigger and more violent than last night.
When I got the word around 2:30 that the government had moved curfew up to 4pm from 6pm, I hurried home to walk the dog one more time. I also did a little more last minute grocery shopping when I saw that people were cleaning out the stores. I bought a kilo of potatoes, a kilo of bananas, some rice, flour (to make banana bread), garlic, and two whole chickens (I froze one). I had already bought all my canned food, bottled water, toilet paper, etc. in the last couple days so I am quite well-stocked for one apartment and a dog.
I talked to my friend Millie and asked her to reassure our friends that I am fine and explain that my neighborhood is outside of the combat zone.
On my way home from after the dog’s afternoon walk, the wife of the man who helped me walk the dog at curfew time yesterday called out to me from her balcony next to my apartment building and reminded me to call on them if I need anything. What sweet people. I will have to bring them a banana bread when the chaos dies down.
I spent the last few minutes before curfew calling around to my friends to get everyone’s landline numbers in case cell service goes down again. I called my mom again, and my grandma, to reassure everyone that I am still fine. I think it is likely a hysterical overreaction but I pulled a heavy piece of furniture across my door. It is so unlikely looters would ever come here, much less think my apartment is worth their time, but my friend lives in a compound far outside the city and said her neighborhood has some looting so I figured better safe than sorry.
CNN is reporting that Ahmed Ezz has resigned. He is a steel magnate who has had a stranglehold on a lot of the business sector for years, thanks to lucrative government contracts paid for in kickbacks. He is possibly disliked by the people on the streets as much or more than the President.
I am going to finally take a shower and then make some banana bread (enough to freeze), stew (enough to freeze), and a chicken (if I can figure out how long to cook it, I can’t believe the Internet still isn’t back up!). I feel like I should be taking some sort of action to prepare (for what, I don’t know) and cooking is kind of the only thing I can do from within my apartment. I’ll make things I can freeze anyway so nothing will go to waste if I wind up not needing to hunker down in my apartment for days.
6:28pm
Mubarak has appointed his intelligence chief as Vice President (which Egypt has not had since Mubarak took power nearly thirty years ago) and the former Aviation Minister (what’s that?) as Prime Minister. I am not at all hopeful that this will satisfy the protesters and, in fact, it doesn’t seem to have impacted them at all. However, it may inadvertently prevent a power vacuum if Mubarak does eventually step down, as there will already be someone in place with the Constitutional authority to govern. Eventually the people will demand someone fairly elected with no association with Mubarak but in the interim, having a VP could be a good thing for restoring some stability or at least staving off total chaos.
I am going to wash the dog.
The military helicopters are back.
7:44pm
There are rumors that looters and state-sponsored gangs of thugs are looting and vandalizing upscale neighborhoods. One of our secretaries who called to confirm we don’t have work tomorrow also confirmed that in her neighborhood, Heliopolis, which is an upper middle class mostly Christian neighborhood near the airport, this was the case. Another expat neighborhood, Maadi’s Road 9 has a lot of coffee shops and restaurants and supposedly the residents grabbed sticks and kitchen knives and formed gangs of their own and ran down to protect their property and businesses. Al Jazeera reported that these neighborhood watch style vigilantes were forming gangs throughout Cairo to protect their homes.
I went out to my balcony and although the street was quiet, a group of six or seven teenagers holding sticks and planks of wood walked past. They looked like middle class boys and so I think they must be the sons of shop owners and doormen who live in the area. Doormen are quite poor but they live in small apartments near the entryways of the buildings they protect so they have a personal interest in patrolling. We have a big metal gate in my apartment that is rarely closed but I imagine it is bolted today.
The military is supposedly sending reinforcements to the suburbs but I have not seen any troops or vehicles yet. I haven’t heard any traffic besides the helicopters in a long time.
Charlie Sheen checked into rehab again. Thanks CNN ticker!
9:12pm
I roasted my first chicken, thanks to all I learned watching Karen in my years in Madison. I used a garlic sauce my friend accidentally left here to make the spice rub, though, so it wasn’t a purely Wisconsin (or Ohio) recipe.
The streets of Zamalek are still relatively quiet but the quiet is broken every now and again by the scraping of a metal barricade (stolen from police by the residents and set up to block the street), the banging of metal, occasionally shouts (far off, thus far) and sometimes shots I can hear from far away. It is definitely not as quiet as yesterday. Yesterday all the people, the energy, the anger was focused on Tahrir and Downtown. Now that people have the idea of looting and vandalizing, the anger is spreading out from Downtown. Some of these guys work for the government. They are plainclothes police or otherwise state-hired thugs.
I want to hear the US government condemn the absence of police. The total withdrawal of police, rather than a piecemeal falling back from protest areas to residential areas in need of protection, indicates that the government has given an order to disperse the police. This is spiteful and immoral. It is a move that whines, “you don’t like the police? Fine, we’ll take them away.” The US needs to demand Mubarak return the police to the streets in a policing capacity, to protect the people and their property from looters. And privately, the US needs to demand he withdraw the looters on his payroll.
11:03pm
Just talked to Mom again. Having the phones back up is really a blessing but I have to conserve my minutes in case I can’t buy more tomorrow. If any of my friends in Zamalek learn of looting or any other danger, though, we can contact one another on our land lines. For now the odd sounds of the neighborhood watch groups getting settled and getting their adrenaline under control have faded and it is extremely quiet outside. There is little to no shooting or tear gas firing sounds coming from Downtown and it does seem that with the military in place the protests are finally relatively peaceful in the Central Cairo area. The number of people in Tahrir is down to a few thousand, which is much earlier than things wrapped up yesterday.
I just saw an interesting piece on Al Jazeera about the young people protecting their neighborhood in Nasser City, another upper middle class suburb about forty minutes out of the city center. The camera watches them make a few traffic stops on the side street that leads into their neighborhood (the army is checking the main thoroughfares but not the side streets). They surround a car they don’t recognize and wave weapons until it stops. Then they check the driver’s bita’a (national ID) and ask his business. Then they discuss it amongst themselves and determine whether or not to let the car pass, at which point it peacefully goes on its way. They are not acting like mobs, but rather as street police.
Almost all eyewitness reports in the media so far claim that the gangs of looters and vandals are police officers in civilian clothes.
12:35am
The news has been reporting the same stories for the last two hours. All is quiet on the Zamalek front. Time to read a bit and head to bed.
January 30, 2011
11:24am
I heard a couple shots last night around 3:45am that sounded like they might have come from 26th of July street, a few blocks away. The street was charred on the block closer to me than 26th of July when I took Whiskey for a walk this morning but my friend Joanne lives on that street and she didn’t call worried last night so I assume it must have been something innocuous like some burning trash or maybe firecrackers.
It is quiet on the streets, partly because today is a work day (though I finally got my snow day), but also because the guys who are usually hurrying around running errands in the morning are exhausted from patrolling the neighborhood all night. But people are still out washing cars, buying groceries and, in my case, going out for coffee.
The military is out but not really “in force.” I saw a group of about four guys protecting a government-owned grocery store, another three in front of a government building on 26th of July street and three more directing traffic at what isn’t even the biggest intersection (the police who normally direct traffic are still gone and the culture of obeying stop lights is unheard of here).
4:47pm
They are buzzing Cairo with military fighter jets to intimidate the crowds and enforce the curfew. Really they’re just scaring the crap out of the law abiding citizens (and law abiding dogs) who are already inside).
The helicopters are back as well. It’s smart, though. It creates the impression of a military presence without actually a lot of troops on the ground.
The Muslim Brotherhood backed Mohammed El Baradei to negotiate a transition with the government. This is a big deal because it shows a level of cooperation and trust within the opposition and a willingness to band together in a practical way to push things forward.
The former interior minister has been arrested by the Army.
Hillary said today that the US supports an orderly transition of power. This is the closest thing we’ve heard so far that could even be interpreted as support for the revolution. I wish they’d come down a little stronger on the Internet blackout issue and on the government encouraging violence and looting issue.
The American Embassy called my friend and told her the US was providing planes tomorrow morning to evacuate citizens. They haven’t called me or two other American friends and their phones have been unsurprisingly busy all day so I don’t know the details. I‘m not sure if a flight out would be free or if I’d have to buy a ticket. Frankly, I don’t really want to leave yet. I trust my neighborhood to protect me and I trust Egyptians to keep their anger focused on the President until he leaves. If El Baradei or even the new VP steps in at that point and returns the police to the streets and orders the gangs to stand down and requests aid to restock the grocery stores and TURNS ON THE INTERNET, we have a real shot at quick stability. I hope this happens soon because there are reports of food and fuel shortages.
Tonight is the second night of vigilante protection against government sponsored gangs of looters and vandals.
7:20pm
At the same time the American Embassy is recommending evacuation, all European embassies are recommending against it. Thanks guys.
8:35pm
Carmen, my friend Dena’s roommate, who has only been in Egypt for less than three weeks, would have been home by herself tonight since Dena is at her grandpa’s in Heliopolis and their other roommate is staying overnight at the Dutch Institute. Their part of the neighborhood saw a little more action than mine last night so she asked to stay with me tonight. We had some spaghetti and vodka lemonade and watched the news for a few hours but I think we’re both about done for the day. I got a bit of a sore throat earlier and I think it is turning into a cold so I am going to read a bit, then go to bed early.
January 31, 2011
8:16pm
Long, busy day. I got up to walk the dog at ten and picked up a bunch of groceries. I am definitely sick so I hit the pharmacy too and stocked up.
Amani and I were going to meet for coffee but none of the coffee shops were open so we walked around and did my grocery shopping together. I stocked up on some more water and refilled a bunch of old water bottles with tap water in case they turn the tap water off, as was rumored today.
Amani had the idea to go to a public park that overlooks Qasr el Nil Bridge, which connects Zamalek to Tahrir Square and is one of the main arteries for the protesters. Today wasn’t even supposed to be a big protest day. The organizers asked for a general strike today and told everyone go home and rest in anticipation of tomorrow’s “Million Man March” from Tahrir to the presidential palace in Heliopolis. (in response to this news, I had two thoughts: first, isn’t the president in Sharm El Sheikh?! Second: that is a loooooong way to march!) Despite today being kind of a down day, our visit to the park was exciting because there were actually a huge number of people marching and chanting on their way to Tahrir. They are apparently planning to spend the whole night. The military is building blockades to prevent people from entering the square so when the protesters heard this they decided to go the night before, before the blockades could be completed, and just stay until tomorrow. Like American Idol tryouts.
The police are back on the street tonight, though not in their usual numbers. I can see a cop at his post out my balcony. I’m not sure if I feel safer having him there or not. I heard a siren (haven’t heard that in a while!) and shots but otherwise Zamalek has been quiet since curfew today at 3pm.
I got to talk to Millie and Jill tonight. I was going kind of stir crazy so it was really nice to talk to people who have something else to do in their lives besides grocery shop and think about Egyptian politics. I am going to go even crazier tomorrow as they’ve moved the curfew up again. We are all supposed to be indoors for the night by 1pm tomorrow. I already have a dog walking date lined up with my neighbor to break curfew. The little critters just can’t stay cooped up for so long. They’re not the only ones.
I just watched an emotional interview on Al Jazeera with Salma El Tarzi, an activist in Tahrir right now. The picture she painted of the protest was inspiring. When asked how people were getting the food, water, and supplies they needed to sustain the protest while the banks were closed. She said “The people who have money are buying food for the people who don’t have, I’ve never been more full in my life because someone is always here offering a bottle of water, a biscuit or a sandwich.” She said that she’d never seen Egyptians so civilized to one another and that perhaps it is because they never felt the country belonged to them but now that they feel they’ve taken it back they feel a responsibility to behave. She said they are setting examples for one another, “You stop to pick up a piece of trash and then you look around and everyone is picking up the trash.” This echoes what Amani said of Tahrir yesterday, which is that everyone is picking up their own garbage and that the square, which is usually quite dirty even when the state is functioning normally, is “spotless.” Wouldn’t it be amazing if Egypt transformed itself into a nation where all its citizens feed one another and no one litters?!
I have heard the phones will be shut off again soon so I am going to try to call home one more time. Then, to bed!
February 1, 2011
3:17pm
Curfew was at 1pm today though enough people thought it was at 3:00 that it essentially was. I walked the dog a couple times and got more banana bread making materials. I went for coffee with my nice neighbors and they offered to cut me in on their backup plan, “like an adopted daughter.” They have a place in a compound out by Hurghada on the Red Sea where they and some friends who also have pets they don’t want to leave alone in Egypt are planning to head if they feel like it is no longer safe in Cairo. They have their three Jeeps gassed up and loaded with water and extra fuel and I am welcome to come. Sounds like a nice vacation, actually. I hope they invite me sometime when the world isn’t in utter chaos.
I haven’t heard the helicopters much today, which makes me think the military really is standing by their word to leave the protesters alone. I am going to tentatively walk the dog toward the bridges today on my side of the Nile in a few hours to see if I can see or hear anything interesting. My guess is the police or the army or the neighborhood guys will stop me before I get there and tell me to go home but it is worth a shot.
3:52pm
Al Jazeera is estimating 2 million people are demonstrating in and around Tahrir Square. That is one-tenth of Cairo’s population.
According to my friend Dena, state TV has been playing patriotic songs and showed a half-hour tour of King Farouk’s palace. They’re showing food deliveries, people at work and peaceful shots of the Nile. Basically they’re putting the camera on every location possible except Tahrir to “prove” to Egyptians that life is going on as normal.
7:30pm
I walked down the Corniche, the wide boulevard along the Nile, on the Zamalek side, with my neighbor, Don, and his dog, Chippy. People were ebbing across the bridges in both directions and the group surrounding the Interior Ministry started singing the national anthem just as we were passing parallel to it on the other side of the Nile.
We could wander around the streets as we pleased since there is basically no traffic. It was great to be able to walk in the middle of roads we usually can’t even spring across.
The two of us with our dogs must have looked pretty innocuous because even though we were breaking curfew by several hours no one stopped us until we were coming back into Zamalek, when a young boy with a kuffeya around his neck carrying a broom handle came over and politely asked us what street we lived on, I guess as a quiz to see if we really lived in Zamalek. We both live on a very obscure street so he knew we really were locals.
We met an Egyptian girl on her way back home to Zamalek after spending six hours standing and chanting in the square. She seemed exhausted but elated and very positive about how kind everyone was to each other in the protests and hopeful about the future. She is a single mom.
I made another loaf of banana bread and brewed a pot of tea for my neighborhood watch. My bawab (doorman) asked for cigarettes to go with it since that is the first thing to have sold out and not be replenished in Zamalek but of course I couldn’t help him out.
CNN just showed a poster someone is holding in Tahrir saying “Yes We Can TOO”. Awesome.
9:11pm
The hilarious activist Salma Tarzi just explained to CNN that Mubarak’s proposal that neither he nor Gamal will run in the next election is not enough and that until he steps down the protesters will stay in Tahrir. She said they’ve set up a soccer tournament that will run for three days as they assume they will be there at least three days and they’ve invited the military to participate in the tournament “and they quite liked the idea.”
If Mubarak really does say that he and Gamal won’t run in the next election it will be a big concession but I doubt it will be enough. It is too late. Those people aren’t going home.
Al Jazeera is reporting that “there is no clear sign of one individual who the protesters would recognize and name as their chosen leader.” They’re acting like this is a defect of some kind. I think this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what these people are out there for. Their whole point is that they are multidimensional, from all religions and walks of life and they want a government that represents them, in that they want a complex, multiparty system, rather than a fake representative system where the NDP holds 97% of the seats in parliament, yet represents none of the people. Al Jazeera said the people are clear about who they want out but not clear about who they want in…because they don’t want a new president, they want new presidential ELECTIONS. They want to be courted by candidates for once. They want to be allowed to vote without intimidation and they want their vote to count. To me those demands are much more complex and touching on a human level than a demand for a particular person would be.
11:10pm
Mubarak just announced on state TV that he will not run for a second term. He said the protests were started “by honest youths and men” but had been “manipulated by political forces”. He emphasized the thieves and arsonists who had taken advantage of the lack of security and called on the police force to restore security while respecting rights and dignity (he used the word dignity about a million times in the speech). He called on parliament to amend the articles of the Constitution to limit the term(s) of the president and he said he would happily pass the banner over to the next president at the end of this term. He said he will “die on the soil of Egypt.” That doesn’t bode well.
The crowd in Tahrir is chanting “Leave! Leave!” and “Not Enough! Not Enough,” and “By Friday afternoon we will be at the Presidential Palace!”
It seems as if you stomp on your people for nearly 30 years they will have the tenacity to stomp on you for quite a long time in return.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Kool senna wenta tayib
This sentence means something like “may you be well all the year.” You use it to say happy new year, happy birthday, and “here, take this tip/bribe.” I just got to use it for the first time and I am pretty excited about it.
My little old garbage man who comes by once a month for the $1.80 I pay him to take out my garbage for the month was counting out my change and in Arabic, I stopped him when he’d given me back all but three times as much as his usual monthly fee and said “thank you, happy new year.” He is always very polite and friendly when he sees me but I scored an even bigger than usual smile this time.
I am going to be using this sentence a lot in the next couple weeks before my trip home in September. Ramadan is supposed to be a time for charity, self-deprivation, and introspection. Since I’m not Muslim, I don’t actually have any charitable obligations but since I’m not fasting, I’m not really doing much self-depriving or introspecting these days so I’ve chosen to focus on charity in the spirit of the season. It is traditional to give gifts (think big tips) to the people who work for you so their families can eat meat a few times during the months.
Usually, the idea that I would have people who work for me would be ridiculous but I seem to have amassed quite the staff in the last few months. In addition to my doorman, who does absolutely nothing (a doorman’s job is to provide security so strangers can’t get into the building, run errands for residents, and keep the common stairwell and landings lit and clean…and my doorman does none of these things and on top of that is totally incomprehensible when he speaks to me and I have to rely on his 12 year old son as communications liaison), I have a dog walker who comes every weekday to take care of Whiskey, and a cleaner who comes once a week.
It is also traditional to buy customary Ramadan sweets for one’s employees. The favorites are basboosa, a sort of cake-like dessert made of semolina (so it is flatter, denser and a little grainier than cake) and then soaked in a floral syrup, and konaffa, which is the texture and appearance of shredded wheat but with a light, crispy pastry taste wound into the shape of a bird’s nest and topped with honey and either pistachios or peanuts. Love konaffa, hate basboosa but basboosa is significantly more popular with Egyptians. When I ask Egyptians what they think of when they think of Ramadan, they smile and their eyes roll back in pleasure and they purr “basboosa!” I think it is because after fasting all day any food tastes way more amazing.
I will be back in Oregon for the feast that marks the end of Ramadan in mid-September so I won’t be around to buy anybody sweets but I might leave some cash with my office mates to get some for the office attendants who are in charge of keeping the lunch room stocked with yogurt, coffee, etc., paying for lunch orders, making copies, getting office supplies, etc. as they are all really diligent about their work and are always very polite and patient with my clumsy Arabic.
The schedule and pace of life has shifted significantly since Ramadan started on Wednesday. I thought it was hard to get my handyman to come to fix something before Ramadan, now I can’t even get him to answer the phone. Apparently the first week of fasting is the most difficult for everyone and everyone works very little or stops altogether until they adjust to the lack of food, water, cigarettes and sex between the hours of dawn and dusk. It is August and extremely hot, and as if abstaining from these necessities (excluding smoking) weren’t hard enough everyone must still venture out into the heat three times during daylight hours for prayers, and endure (I mean enjoy?) an EXTRA hour of prayers specific to Ramadan in the evening after the normal evening prayer.
The time zone itself shifted back one hour to winter time. Daylight savings is canceled for the month of Ramadan so that everyone can sleep in an extra hour before work and thus shorten, in a way, the amount of time one has to be awake feeling hungry and thirsty from the fasting. The clocks will jump ahead again for the three weeks starting at Eid el Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, and October first, when it officially “falls back” to winter time again.
The pace of work and reliability of service, always questionable at best in Egypt, has slogged to a near-halt this first week of fasting (veteran expats say it gets better next week) meaning I cannot get my air conditioning fixed to save my life (it has been two weeks) or get the pair of pants the tailor is supposedly making for me any time soon (he said it would take a week but it has actually been SIX weeks! They’d better be pants made of gold when I pick them up). There are certain times of the day (during prayers, any time before noon when people are trying to sleep as long as possible so they don’t have to feel how much fasting sucks, and during Iftar and the special Ramadan prayers which, together, last until around 9:30pm) when everything is closed and no one answers the phone or shows up to work, even if work is sitting on the broken sofa on the street outside my apartment.
Iftar, or the daily breaking of the fast occurs around 6:40 every day and is traditionally dates and sugared tea (every beverage is heavily sugared in Egypt) followed by heavier foods with family and friends. Each day’s iftar is an event and Egyptians hop from invitation to invitation with various relatives, groups of friends, and colleagues such that Ramadan, despite the stress and difficulty of fasting during the day, made extra cruel by the fast that each year it moves earlier and earlier into the summer and thus gets longer and hotter, is a time many look forward to for the spirit of love, friendship, and community similar to what Americans feel leading up to Christmas.
The single beer distributor is closed during Ramadan and many places that serve very cheap food have closed or stopped delivery services during the day because the volume of orders drops so significantly that turning out buckets of koshery, for example, a mix of small tube shaped macaroni, chopped up spaghetti, lentils, rice, fried onions, tomato sauce, spicy sauce, and garlic isn’t a sustainable business this month. Technically no one can legally be served alcohol during Ramadan, even in restaurants and bars, but some of the older places either have grandfathered exceptions allowing them to serve to foreigners (you actually have to show your passport to order a drink if you look Egyptian to prove you have a foreign nationality) or else they are paying off the cops. Places that don’t get enough expat business to justify paying those bribes (kool senna wenta tayib, officer!) use the month to remodel. The rule against serving Egyptians is particularly unfair to the Copts, who are Egyptian and thus have no foreign passport but who obviously don’t observe Ramadan and have no religious prohibitions against drinking alcohol. They can’t get alcohol this month and thus, like many expats, stock up on beer, etc. the week before and just drink at home or in the homes of friends more than usual this time of year.
I walk the dog exactly at Iftar time now, as the streets are completely empty, no traffic, and no groups of young men sitting around the front doors of buildings drinking tea and smoking to distract the job from his central task of putting one foot in front of the other (it is soooo easy to distract a puppy!). I haven’t changed my clothing habits yet but I will dress a little more conservatively if I start getting harassed. Apparently Egyptian men who are abstaining from sex and supposedly masturbation during the day and who are supposed to be purifying themselves through this self-deprivation blame women who dress too provocatively (skirts or shorts above the knees, tops that are too low-cut, showing too much upper arm, etc. for “tempting” them to think the very thoughts they are supposed to banish. Like drinking ice water or eating a juicy burger in front of a melting, sweating fast-er, walking around in my Capri pants and short-sleeved shirt might be viewed as a betrayal of religious ideals this time of year and could get me into trouble. It is freaking hot, though, so I’m still walking around in my knee-length shorts and short-sleeved shirts until someone yells at me.
I’m sure I’ll come across more examples of Ramadan-induced chaos as the month wears on but those are the basics for now. It feels a bit like accidentally falling through a black hole into another reality where all the rules I’ve learned so far get tossed out the window and I have to learn a whole new set of cultural norms. Actually stepping into a new time zone doesn’t help counter the surreal feeling very much and, in another unexpected turn, the entire city ran out of fruit yogurt, my primary staple food, all at once yesterday, leading me to believe I am actually dreaming a terrible anxiety dream. Pinch me!
My little old garbage man who comes by once a month for the $1.80 I pay him to take out my garbage for the month was counting out my change and in Arabic, I stopped him when he’d given me back all but three times as much as his usual monthly fee and said “thank you, happy new year.” He is always very polite and friendly when he sees me but I scored an even bigger than usual smile this time.
I am going to be using this sentence a lot in the next couple weeks before my trip home in September. Ramadan is supposed to be a time for charity, self-deprivation, and introspection. Since I’m not Muslim, I don’t actually have any charitable obligations but since I’m not fasting, I’m not really doing much self-depriving or introspecting these days so I’ve chosen to focus on charity in the spirit of the season. It is traditional to give gifts (think big tips) to the people who work for you so their families can eat meat a few times during the months.
Usually, the idea that I would have people who work for me would be ridiculous but I seem to have amassed quite the staff in the last few months. In addition to my doorman, who does absolutely nothing (a doorman’s job is to provide security so strangers can’t get into the building, run errands for residents, and keep the common stairwell and landings lit and clean…and my doorman does none of these things and on top of that is totally incomprehensible when he speaks to me and I have to rely on his 12 year old son as communications liaison), I have a dog walker who comes every weekday to take care of Whiskey, and a cleaner who comes once a week.
It is also traditional to buy customary Ramadan sweets for one’s employees. The favorites are basboosa, a sort of cake-like dessert made of semolina (so it is flatter, denser and a little grainier than cake) and then soaked in a floral syrup, and konaffa, which is the texture and appearance of shredded wheat but with a light, crispy pastry taste wound into the shape of a bird’s nest and topped with honey and either pistachios or peanuts. Love konaffa, hate basboosa but basboosa is significantly more popular with Egyptians. When I ask Egyptians what they think of when they think of Ramadan, they smile and their eyes roll back in pleasure and they purr “basboosa!” I think it is because after fasting all day any food tastes way more amazing.
I will be back in Oregon for the feast that marks the end of Ramadan in mid-September so I won’t be around to buy anybody sweets but I might leave some cash with my office mates to get some for the office attendants who are in charge of keeping the lunch room stocked with yogurt, coffee, etc., paying for lunch orders, making copies, getting office supplies, etc. as they are all really diligent about their work and are always very polite and patient with my clumsy Arabic.
The schedule and pace of life has shifted significantly since Ramadan started on Wednesday. I thought it was hard to get my handyman to come to fix something before Ramadan, now I can’t even get him to answer the phone. Apparently the first week of fasting is the most difficult for everyone and everyone works very little or stops altogether until they adjust to the lack of food, water, cigarettes and sex between the hours of dawn and dusk. It is August and extremely hot, and as if abstaining from these necessities (excluding smoking) weren’t hard enough everyone must still venture out into the heat three times during daylight hours for prayers, and endure (I mean enjoy?) an EXTRA hour of prayers specific to Ramadan in the evening after the normal evening prayer.
The time zone itself shifted back one hour to winter time. Daylight savings is canceled for the month of Ramadan so that everyone can sleep in an extra hour before work and thus shorten, in a way, the amount of time one has to be awake feeling hungry and thirsty from the fasting. The clocks will jump ahead again for the three weeks starting at Eid el Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan, and October first, when it officially “falls back” to winter time again.
The pace of work and reliability of service, always questionable at best in Egypt, has slogged to a near-halt this first week of fasting (veteran expats say it gets better next week) meaning I cannot get my air conditioning fixed to save my life (it has been two weeks) or get the pair of pants the tailor is supposedly making for me any time soon (he said it would take a week but it has actually been SIX weeks! They’d better be pants made of gold when I pick them up). There are certain times of the day (during prayers, any time before noon when people are trying to sleep as long as possible so they don’t have to feel how much fasting sucks, and during Iftar and the special Ramadan prayers which, together, last until around 9:30pm) when everything is closed and no one answers the phone or shows up to work, even if work is sitting on the broken sofa on the street outside my apartment.
Iftar, or the daily breaking of the fast occurs around 6:40 every day and is traditionally dates and sugared tea (every beverage is heavily sugared in Egypt) followed by heavier foods with family and friends. Each day’s iftar is an event and Egyptians hop from invitation to invitation with various relatives, groups of friends, and colleagues such that Ramadan, despite the stress and difficulty of fasting during the day, made extra cruel by the fast that each year it moves earlier and earlier into the summer and thus gets longer and hotter, is a time many look forward to for the spirit of love, friendship, and community similar to what Americans feel leading up to Christmas.
The single beer distributor is closed during Ramadan and many places that serve very cheap food have closed or stopped delivery services during the day because the volume of orders drops so significantly that turning out buckets of koshery, for example, a mix of small tube shaped macaroni, chopped up spaghetti, lentils, rice, fried onions, tomato sauce, spicy sauce, and garlic isn’t a sustainable business this month. Technically no one can legally be served alcohol during Ramadan, even in restaurants and bars, but some of the older places either have grandfathered exceptions allowing them to serve to foreigners (you actually have to show your passport to order a drink if you look Egyptian to prove you have a foreign nationality) or else they are paying off the cops. Places that don’t get enough expat business to justify paying those bribes (kool senna wenta tayib, officer!) use the month to remodel. The rule against serving Egyptians is particularly unfair to the Copts, who are Egyptian and thus have no foreign passport but who obviously don’t observe Ramadan and have no religious prohibitions against drinking alcohol. They can’t get alcohol this month and thus, like many expats, stock up on beer, etc. the week before and just drink at home or in the homes of friends more than usual this time of year.
I walk the dog exactly at Iftar time now, as the streets are completely empty, no traffic, and no groups of young men sitting around the front doors of buildings drinking tea and smoking to distract the job from his central task of putting one foot in front of the other (it is soooo easy to distract a puppy!). I haven’t changed my clothing habits yet but I will dress a little more conservatively if I start getting harassed. Apparently Egyptian men who are abstaining from sex and supposedly masturbation during the day and who are supposed to be purifying themselves through this self-deprivation blame women who dress too provocatively (skirts or shorts above the knees, tops that are too low-cut, showing too much upper arm, etc. for “tempting” them to think the very thoughts they are supposed to banish. Like drinking ice water or eating a juicy burger in front of a melting, sweating fast-er, walking around in my Capri pants and short-sleeved shirt might be viewed as a betrayal of religious ideals this time of year and could get me into trouble. It is freaking hot, though, so I’m still walking around in my knee-length shorts and short-sleeved shirts until someone yells at me.
I’m sure I’ll come across more examples of Ramadan-induced chaos as the month wears on but those are the basics for now. It feels a bit like accidentally falling through a black hole into another reality where all the rules I’ve learned so far get tossed out the window and I have to learn a whole new set of cultural norms. Actually stepping into a new time zone doesn’t help counter the surreal feeling very much and, in another unexpected turn, the entire city ran out of fruit yogurt, my primary staple food, all at once yesterday, leading me to believe I am actually dreaming a terrible anxiety dream. Pinch me!
Saturday, August 7, 2010
This one's not about immigration, I swear
For those of you with an excess of prayers, positive energy, compassion, and a few minutes on your hands, can I suggest aiming whatever you’ve got at Russia and Pakistan for a moment or two? Pakistan is suffering the deadliest flooding in eighty years and Russia is plagued by forest fires. As if forest fires spreading across the country weren’t frightening enough, consider what those fires are spreading toward. Apparently, Chernobyl could burn. If the fires reach Chernobyl, all the nuclear material that has been absorbed into the surrounding woods will be turned into smoke and blown around Russia and the world.
Why would I ask you to think and pray for those suffering in far off parts of the world rather than demanding your positive thoughts for myself? Well, I am awesome that way, but also, I am significantly less miserable this week. I got assigned to a new case! It is sure to cause some friction with my office mate this week as she has been increasingly depressed by having spent the last two years on this same construction case I’ve been on since I started, and it has been an unspoken rule in my department that we won’t be assigned to new cases until we finish the statement of claim for the case we’re working on.
So what changed? How’d I get lucky? This spring, I told UW’s Career Services office that my firm was hiring and around 20 people applied. When applicants asked to Skype with me about life at the firm and in Cairo, I gave up a couple hours of my weekends to do so and when asked by HR or senior associates about different quirks of American writing samples, cover letters, etc. I shared what I knew. It wasn’t really that much of a time sacrifice on my part and I was happy to give other UW grads a shot at gainful employment in a still-crappy job market and maybe help out the firm in the process if someone actually worked out.
I had my last HR-related meeting on Tuesday night and on Wednesday afternoon, I was told I would be going to a client meeting the next morning with a senior associate and the principal partner. I was absolutely terrified but my friend told me I’d be surprised after having worked on this very complicated construction case for eight months how much I’d understand. It turned out to be true and I really did get everything that was talked about at the meeting. I hope I get to stay on the case because it is so refreshingly straightforward compared to my usual day to day work and because it is a big honor to be put on something different before my current task wraps up.
So I am pretty excited. I’ve started looking forward to work now that it has shifted from doc review to actual drafting and the addition of a new case, if they do indeed keep me on it, can only boost my confidence and further convince me I’m capable of doing legal work.
In other news, Whisky is now all caught up on his shots. After 2.5 hours of waiting and 5 minutes in the doctor’s clutches, he has his rabies vaccine. He is also proving to be quite the guy magnet. In addition to attracting every child within barking distance while out on our walks, he also gets the attention of several groups of Egyptian men, hanging out outside buildings and in parking lots either for work or recreation. Today his unbearable cuteness pulled over a really good looking real-estate broker (in Egypt this usually just means a guy with a cell phone who knows other guys with cell phones who call each other when they know of an open apartment and exchange favors and commission fees and bilk foreigners out of a full month’s rent in exchange for finding something one could find by walking around the neighborhood). This guy was well-built, had nice green eyes, which is unusual here, was well-dressed, obviously not lazy as I ran into him out in the heat at 10am, spoke English, and was good with the dog.
I had already been out in the mucky August air and the muddy (air conditioning drip plus street dirt), garbage strewn street (the garbage men who clean the streets and scoop up the piles of trash people leave on the corners of sidewalks don’t work on Friday so Saturday morning is the grossest time to be outside) and was sweaty, hair pulled back but falling out of my ponytail in humidity-compelled frizzy chunks, drips of sweat literally sliding down from my temples to my jaw, and dirty-footed in my flip flops that my wet, grimy dog keeps stepping and sitting on when he wants to take a break. I was in shorts long enough to cover my knees but not quite long enough to be stylish capris, a dirty tank top because today was set to be laundry day, and a collared short-sleeve shirt somewhere between green and grey. And did I mention I was sweaty?
When good looking guys stop me on the street to ask me out I am suspicious. When good looking guys stop me on the street in my dog walking clothes before my shower after infrequent dipping in mud and trash I am very suspicious. I need to talk about this more with my Egyptian friends but either he asked me out because he wants to have sex and in the minds of Egyptian men, foreign women = sex, Egyptian women = marriage, or he asked me out to try to sell me real estate. Either way, if you yourself are good looking, educated and employed, you don’t ask someone out who looks as gross as I did this morning within 10 seconds of meeting them because you liked their personality when you saw them dragging their unwilling dog out of a puddle of air conditioning slime. You do it because you want something.
Maybe I am judging this guy (and all Egyptian guys I’ve met so far) and myself, too harshly, but it is definitely one of the pitfalls of living in a culture where gender relationships and sex are viewed so completely differently than in my own. Getting hit on by a polite, good looking guy should be flattering but instead I am left a bit bitter, thinking he is more likely a creep who watches too much imported porn and thinks all American women are (or aspire to be) Lisa Sparxxx.
Sorry for the two blog posts today. I am stuck at home waiting for the guy to come fix my air conditioning…which means I am stuck in my UN-air conditioned home waiting for the guy to come fix my air conditioning. Watching a lot of TV, playing fetch for 30 seconds at a time since the dog can’t make more than one or two trips to catch the toy until he is too hot and has to lie down, and trying to clean my apartment with my mind. Going about as well as you’d expect.
Why would I ask you to think and pray for those suffering in far off parts of the world rather than demanding your positive thoughts for myself? Well, I am awesome that way, but also, I am significantly less miserable this week. I got assigned to a new case! It is sure to cause some friction with my office mate this week as she has been increasingly depressed by having spent the last two years on this same construction case I’ve been on since I started, and it has been an unspoken rule in my department that we won’t be assigned to new cases until we finish the statement of claim for the case we’re working on.
So what changed? How’d I get lucky? This spring, I told UW’s Career Services office that my firm was hiring and around 20 people applied. When applicants asked to Skype with me about life at the firm and in Cairo, I gave up a couple hours of my weekends to do so and when asked by HR or senior associates about different quirks of American writing samples, cover letters, etc. I shared what I knew. It wasn’t really that much of a time sacrifice on my part and I was happy to give other UW grads a shot at gainful employment in a still-crappy job market and maybe help out the firm in the process if someone actually worked out.
I had my last HR-related meeting on Tuesday night and on Wednesday afternoon, I was told I would be going to a client meeting the next morning with a senior associate and the principal partner. I was absolutely terrified but my friend told me I’d be surprised after having worked on this very complicated construction case for eight months how much I’d understand. It turned out to be true and I really did get everything that was talked about at the meeting. I hope I get to stay on the case because it is so refreshingly straightforward compared to my usual day to day work and because it is a big honor to be put on something different before my current task wraps up.
So I am pretty excited. I’ve started looking forward to work now that it has shifted from doc review to actual drafting and the addition of a new case, if they do indeed keep me on it, can only boost my confidence and further convince me I’m capable of doing legal work.
In other news, Whisky is now all caught up on his shots. After 2.5 hours of waiting and 5 minutes in the doctor’s clutches, he has his rabies vaccine. He is also proving to be quite the guy magnet. In addition to attracting every child within barking distance while out on our walks, he also gets the attention of several groups of Egyptian men, hanging out outside buildings and in parking lots either for work or recreation. Today his unbearable cuteness pulled over a really good looking real-estate broker (in Egypt this usually just means a guy with a cell phone who knows other guys with cell phones who call each other when they know of an open apartment and exchange favors and commission fees and bilk foreigners out of a full month’s rent in exchange for finding something one could find by walking around the neighborhood). This guy was well-built, had nice green eyes, which is unusual here, was well-dressed, obviously not lazy as I ran into him out in the heat at 10am, spoke English, and was good with the dog.
I had already been out in the mucky August air and the muddy (air conditioning drip plus street dirt), garbage strewn street (the garbage men who clean the streets and scoop up the piles of trash people leave on the corners of sidewalks don’t work on Friday so Saturday morning is the grossest time to be outside) and was sweaty, hair pulled back but falling out of my ponytail in humidity-compelled frizzy chunks, drips of sweat literally sliding down from my temples to my jaw, and dirty-footed in my flip flops that my wet, grimy dog keeps stepping and sitting on when he wants to take a break. I was in shorts long enough to cover my knees but not quite long enough to be stylish capris, a dirty tank top because today was set to be laundry day, and a collared short-sleeve shirt somewhere between green and grey. And did I mention I was sweaty?
When good looking guys stop me on the street to ask me out I am suspicious. When good looking guys stop me on the street in my dog walking clothes before my shower after infrequent dipping in mud and trash I am very suspicious. I need to talk about this more with my Egyptian friends but either he asked me out because he wants to have sex and in the minds of Egyptian men, foreign women = sex, Egyptian women = marriage, or he asked me out to try to sell me real estate. Either way, if you yourself are good looking, educated and employed, you don’t ask someone out who looks as gross as I did this morning within 10 seconds of meeting them because you liked their personality when you saw them dragging their unwilling dog out of a puddle of air conditioning slime. You do it because you want something.
Maybe I am judging this guy (and all Egyptian guys I’ve met so far) and myself, too harshly, but it is definitely one of the pitfalls of living in a culture where gender relationships and sex are viewed so completely differently than in my own. Getting hit on by a polite, good looking guy should be flattering but instead I am left a bit bitter, thinking he is more likely a creep who watches too much imported porn and thinks all American women are (or aspire to be) Lisa Sparxxx.
Sorry for the two blog posts today. I am stuck at home waiting for the guy to come fix my air conditioning…which means I am stuck in my UN-air conditioned home waiting for the guy to come fix my air conditioning. Watching a lot of TV, playing fetch for 30 seconds at a time since the dog can’t make more than one or two trips to catch the toy until he is too hot and has to lie down, and trying to clean my apartment with my mind. Going about as well as you’d expect.
Dear Lindsey Graham, Lou Dobbs is making you look like a Dbag.
After watching Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert all weekend, I was delighted to learn Elena Kagan has been confirmed, Prop 8 overturned in California in a 138 page ruling making fun of the pro-Prop 8 so-called “experts” who got their "information" from the internet and discussions with like-minded friends, and Naomi Campbell actually testified against Charles Taylor in the Hague (c’mon, who really thought she’d show?!).
I was also honestly quite shocked to discover that the kind of idea that SHOULD by all rights be isolated to the far right wing of the far right wing of the Republican party is getting some play among Senators who I have previously considered to be somewhat reasonable. I am talking about the “anchor babies” craziness sweeping the conservative airways. And I am talking about Sen. Lindsey Graham, of S. Carolina who is usually not given to quite that level of craziness.
Remember Lindsey Graham? After giving NOW SUPREME COURT JUSTICE Elena Kagan a little bit of a hard time for having called the judicial confirmation process a “vapid and hollow charade,” in what was one of the funnier moments of her own confirmation hearings (he also gave her the opening for her joke about spending Christmas in a Chinese restaurant), he crossed the aisle to confirm Kagan, just as he had also voted for Sonia Sotomayor. Sounds like a reasonable guy, right?
Well former reasonable guy Lindsey Graham has gone off the rails on the subject of immigration reform (which I thought conservatives didn’t want to talk about going into midterms because they’d lose the Latino vote they need) and, of all things, the Fourteenth Amendment. Now if there is one thing I never thought I’d hear floated by formerly reasonable senators as a purportedly reasonable option, it is repealing the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Fourteenth is not just any old Amendment: not the one about not having to quarter troops in our homes (because when has that been an issue recently?) or the one prohibiting cruel and usual punishment (because we do that anyway, regardless of the Constitution), not the one creating lame duck sessions of congress (why is this in there again?) or making senators directly elected by the people (you’d think Senators should be more afraid of this one). No, the Fourteenth is the one that protects us from discrimination, defines citizenship (and means we don’t have to file complicated citizenship forms when we have our babies in the US), applies the bill of rights to the states, grants equal protection under the law to ALL PEOPLE in the US, and has always been the ONE THING conservatives point to when they tell women we don’t need our own Equal Rights Amendment because we already have the Fourteenth Amendment to watch our backs. This is the Amendment that demands African American no longer be counted as three-fifths of a person.
And yet it is this BIG FREAKING AMENDMENT that Lindsey Graham called “outdated” this week.
Because of a conservative talk show-fueled rumor that pregnant immigrants are sneaking into the US by the millions either illegally or on tourist visas to have their babies on US soil to use as “anchor babies” to get the rest of their illegal immigrant families the rights and benefits of US citizenship.
First off, immigration doesn’t work like that. Remember all those stories right at the end of Bush’s presidency about how increased immigration enforcement (and decreased common sense) was resulting in US citizen children basically becoming orphans at the hands of the government when ICE sent their parents “home” to Mexico? It isn’t like if a baby born on US soil is some sort of Green Card Midas child that confers citizenship automatically on everyone she touches.
Besides the legal issues involved, there is also a practical smackdown to the truth of these rumors of so-called “birth tourism,” where wealthy pregnant women fly in from Brazil (this is the repeated example but I don’t know why they’re picking on Brazil), have a child, then fly home with a US citizen child. Women are not allowed to fly past their 32 week of pregnancy. After the 29th week they need a certificate from their doctor stating they are still early enough along to fly and the airline reserves the right to have pregnant potential-passengers examined by a doctor if they don’t believe the certificate.
And yet, this totally irrational “anchor babies” rumor was enough to push Lindsey Graham, and a lot of people a lot crazier than Lindsey Graham, right off the Cliffs of Insanity.
Is he really prepared to withdraw all the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment and redefine citizenship such that every child born in the US has to APPLY FOR CITIZENSHIP now? Does he have any idea how much more bureaucracy that will create? To counter an imaginary onslaught of babies with imaginary powers to grant legal status? I mean, I expect this kind of crap from Jon Kyl, but really Senator Graham? REALLY?!
Speaking of people who are usually a lot crazier than Lindsey Graham, Lou Dobbs, yes LOU DOBBS, has earned a shout out from the far left, the left, the middle, and the thoughtful on this subject. He said, ON FOX NEWS (was it ballsy or was it because this is the only audience for Lou Dobbs anymore?):
“The idea that anchor babies somehow require changing the 14th Amendment, I part ways with the senators on that, because I believe the 14th Amendment, particularly in its due process and equal protection clauses, is so important. We have a law in which they become American citizens for being born here…If you’re going to insist upon the rule of law and order—and I do—I have to insist that we recognize these anchor babies as US citizens.”
LOU DOBBS SAID THAT!
So shame on you, Senator Graham, for siding with racist no-immigration-law-knowing, no-compassion-having thoughtless idiot moron buffoons on this one. And, in fact, leading the charge.
And shame on you Senators Jon Kyl, John McCain (really, man, what happened to you?), Jeff Sessions, and Mitch McConnell (even though you’re backing off your support now, the whole “I thought I read an article about it once” defense doesn’t fly).
Shame.
I was also honestly quite shocked to discover that the kind of idea that SHOULD by all rights be isolated to the far right wing of the far right wing of the Republican party is getting some play among Senators who I have previously considered to be somewhat reasonable. I am talking about the “anchor babies” craziness sweeping the conservative airways. And I am talking about Sen. Lindsey Graham, of S. Carolina who is usually not given to quite that level of craziness.
Remember Lindsey Graham? After giving NOW SUPREME COURT JUSTICE Elena Kagan a little bit of a hard time for having called the judicial confirmation process a “vapid and hollow charade,” in what was one of the funnier moments of her own confirmation hearings (he also gave her the opening for her joke about spending Christmas in a Chinese restaurant), he crossed the aisle to confirm Kagan, just as he had also voted for Sonia Sotomayor. Sounds like a reasonable guy, right?
Well former reasonable guy Lindsey Graham has gone off the rails on the subject of immigration reform (which I thought conservatives didn’t want to talk about going into midterms because they’d lose the Latino vote they need) and, of all things, the Fourteenth Amendment. Now if there is one thing I never thought I’d hear floated by formerly reasonable senators as a purportedly reasonable option, it is repealing the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Fourteenth is not just any old Amendment: not the one about not having to quarter troops in our homes (because when has that been an issue recently?) or the one prohibiting cruel and usual punishment (because we do that anyway, regardless of the Constitution), not the one creating lame duck sessions of congress (why is this in there again?) or making senators directly elected by the people (you’d think Senators should be more afraid of this one). No, the Fourteenth is the one that protects us from discrimination, defines citizenship (and means we don’t have to file complicated citizenship forms when we have our babies in the US), applies the bill of rights to the states, grants equal protection under the law to ALL PEOPLE in the US, and has always been the ONE THING conservatives point to when they tell women we don’t need our own Equal Rights Amendment because we already have the Fourteenth Amendment to watch our backs. This is the Amendment that demands African American no longer be counted as three-fifths of a person.
And yet it is this BIG FREAKING AMENDMENT that Lindsey Graham called “outdated” this week.
Because of a conservative talk show-fueled rumor that pregnant immigrants are sneaking into the US by the millions either illegally or on tourist visas to have their babies on US soil to use as “anchor babies” to get the rest of their illegal immigrant families the rights and benefits of US citizenship.
First off, immigration doesn’t work like that. Remember all those stories right at the end of Bush’s presidency about how increased immigration enforcement (and decreased common sense) was resulting in US citizen children basically becoming orphans at the hands of the government when ICE sent their parents “home” to Mexico? It isn’t like if a baby born on US soil is some sort of Green Card Midas child that confers citizenship automatically on everyone she touches.
Besides the legal issues involved, there is also a practical smackdown to the truth of these rumors of so-called “birth tourism,” where wealthy pregnant women fly in from Brazil (this is the repeated example but I don’t know why they’re picking on Brazil), have a child, then fly home with a US citizen child. Women are not allowed to fly past their 32 week of pregnancy. After the 29th week they need a certificate from their doctor stating they are still early enough along to fly and the airline reserves the right to have pregnant potential-passengers examined by a doctor if they don’t believe the certificate.
And yet, this totally irrational “anchor babies” rumor was enough to push Lindsey Graham, and a lot of people a lot crazier than Lindsey Graham, right off the Cliffs of Insanity.
Is he really prepared to withdraw all the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment and redefine citizenship such that every child born in the US has to APPLY FOR CITIZENSHIP now? Does he have any idea how much more bureaucracy that will create? To counter an imaginary onslaught of babies with imaginary powers to grant legal status? I mean, I expect this kind of crap from Jon Kyl, but really Senator Graham? REALLY?!
Speaking of people who are usually a lot crazier than Lindsey Graham, Lou Dobbs, yes LOU DOBBS, has earned a shout out from the far left, the left, the middle, and the thoughtful on this subject. He said, ON FOX NEWS (was it ballsy or was it because this is the only audience for Lou Dobbs anymore?):
“The idea that anchor babies somehow require changing the 14th Amendment, I part ways with the senators on that, because I believe the 14th Amendment, particularly in its due process and equal protection clauses, is so important. We have a law in which they become American citizens for being born here…If you’re going to insist upon the rule of law and order—and I do—I have to insist that we recognize these anchor babies as US citizens.”
LOU DOBBS SAID THAT!
So shame on you, Senator Graham, for siding with racist no-immigration-law-knowing, no-compassion-having thoughtless idiot moron buffoons on this one. And, in fact, leading the charge.
And shame on you Senators Jon Kyl, John McCain (really, man, what happened to you?), Jeff Sessions, and Mitch McConnell (even though you’re backing off your support now, the whole “I thought I read an article about it once” defense doesn’t fly).
Shame.
Friday, July 23, 2010
8 hour minimum
Two weeks ago, the manager in charge of developing systems and policies in the firm (the firm is only 5 years old and this is the first time enough lawyers have worked there that they need policies for things like taking time off to attend conferences and courses, matching contributions for gym memberships, how to bill for time spent recruiting, etc.) sent out an email declaring that everyone had to bill a minimum of 8 hours each day.
This was surprising because it is pretty well known among foreign lawyers here that part of the deal of working in Egypt, part of what you get out of accepting the significantly lower salary that comes from working in the Egyptian market is that you don’t have the same high yearly targets as big British and American firms. At my old non-profit office, “nine to five” meant you had to be in at least by eleven and everyone would start lining up at 4:55 to clock out. Those who came at nine got paid the same as those who came in at eleven. It is just the way things work in Egypt.
So the fact that things will no longer work that way in the firm has its positives and its drawbacks. On the one hand, for recruitment and business development purposes it is obviously important that potential hires and potential clients take us as seriously as they would take a big European or New York law firm. So when we say we have a billing target of 1700 per year and 8 hour minimum days (that is 8 hours that must be billed either to client work or firm work such as recruitment, professional development, research, etc.), which actually works out to a higher billing target than the 1700 hours we’ve been told to aim for, clients, lawyers, and other law firms will understand that conforms pretty well to a high industry standard.
On the other hand, although I was billing around seven hours (which takes about nine or ten hours of actually being in the office to acquire nine billable hours, depending on how efficient I am on any given day) a lot of people were only billing five or so. So this new rule essentially ups everyone’s billable hours and the amount of time everyone has to stay in the office to hit that new target without acknowledging that fundamental truth with a pay increase. The email was dictatorial and vague, offering no details as to how meeting or not meeting the 8 hour minimum requirement would be weighted against other factors at our annual performance reviews in January. Supposedly there will be a follow up email from the boss, who thought this email was a draft and was surprised when it was sent out to everyone as it was but he’s been busy and everyone is struggling to stay calm and professional while management gets the quirks of the new policy straightened out.
It has been stressful because under the new policy, I now have to leave the house around 9 and don’t get home until 7:30 or 8. I have less time to spend with my puppy, Whisky (who got his second round of vaccinations today and is asleep on my foot) and things like reading and exercising have fallen off the map entirely. I usually need a lot of sleep to keep up my pathetic immune system but I am going to need to start training myself to do with less so I can keep those things in my life that keep me sane.
On the subject of health, I want to give a shout out to the Ludwig family, longtime friends of my family, whose mom, Patti, was hit by a car earlier this week. She is still in the ICU in a drug-induced coma at Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland. Her family have set up a blog to update friends and family on her condition. For those of you who know Patti and want to post your support in comments on the blog or send her family something you want them to read to Patti, the link is: http://www.carepages.com/carepages/pattiludwig but you have to set up an account on the homepage first. She is receiving music therapy and they are planning to take her out of the drug-induced coma for a thorough neurological assessment Friday morning. Please everyone send Patti and her family their positive thoughts and prayers.
It has been a difficult year to be so far from home and family. My mom’s friend Sarene passed away suddenly of liver cancer only a month or two after I moved here and a childhood friend of my brother’s died while Thomas was staying with me. I wish I was just the typical few minutes or even few hours’ drive from these friends and their families so I could offer my support but there isn’t much I can do from here. It is very frustrating.
On an unrelated note, though also intensely frustrating, I have yet to successfully order groceries delivered. This is apparently what all of my friends do to save the precious time that we now have so little of but although it is not difficult to find someone in a store who speaks English and can understand and record my order, that fact is completely unrelated to any possibility that the ordered and properly recorded order will actually arrive. For example, the first time I tried this, I ordered “chicken breasts cut into cubes.” I said exactly that in English and in Arabic and the guy taking the order repeated it back to me. When it arrived, they had sent chicken bouillon cubes. I can sort of get the similarity but there is no way there is a “breast” meat option for bouillon cubes, nor is there any “cutting” involved so the guy should have thought twice when he checked the order.
Today, I ordered one kilo center-cut steak cut into small cubes separated into two Styrofoam packets of a half kilo each and one half-kilo of chicken breast cut into small cubes. Again, I went over the order with a guy who spoke very good English and just to be sure, I explained what I wanted in Arabic as well. I had a good feeling about ordering this time, as this is something people, even non-Arabic speaking people, do successfully all the time, but once again, Cairo served me right for getting my hopes up. The order was totally butchered. Pun intended!
According to the delivery boy there was apparently no chicken breast available today so they just didn’t bring any chicken at all. Instead of beef, they sent veal, which is a completely different word, and twice as expensive. The whole kilo was stuffed into one packet so I had to pull it out to freeze it in separate bags instead of just freezing it as is and the “small cubes” were slabs as big as my palm. If you order small cubes in person, they give you pieces about the size of a quarter. So with my dull crap veggie-cutting knife, I had to cut the veal into smaller and smaller pieces before I could freeze it. The knife was so dull it took like fifteen strokes of the blade to create one cube. Because it is veal instead of beef, I feel like I need to make it in a nice marinade or something because it would be totally wasted in a fajita or stir fry.
If anybody has any interesting meat recipes for grilling, baking, or tajine, hit me up!
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