a storm not yet passed

After walking around the neighborhood for about 45 minutes, I think it was too quick to say that the calm has arrived. On 26th of July Street (the main artery of Zamalek) I did find one business whose windows were completely smashed, though I have no idea why that particular business was singled out.

Most of the soldiers are clustered in large masses in various places along 26th of July, and the officers are very particular about which ways you’re allowed to walk. I also saw one minor incident of violence, a man waving an Egyptian flag in a shoving match with someone else, though neither of their motives could be guessed; the soldiers came running to stop that incident in a hurry, but I didn’t see how it ended.

And as usual, I had to talk my way through barricades away from and toward my own street. The easiest technique seems to be if I approach Brazil Street at the intersection closest to my home, so that I can directly point to my door when a soldier asks me where I am going.

So, my current best guess is that we will still have scattered (or possibly worse) incidents of violence tonight like last night, but that the police-created labyrinths of barricades will probably succeed in pushing all incidents a few blocks further away from the Embassy. Most likely they are very embarrassed that the stone-throwers managed to sneak through this morning, and I doubt that will be allowed to happen again. The placement of the barricades is topologically impressive; clearly, someone in the Interior Ministry has barricade placement down to a science, though it is a bit unnerving to think over what scenarios they may have had in mind when studying the problem.

The good news is, my little stretch of Brazil Street now lies entirely within the heart of the barricade district, meaning that I can walk freely up and down about 4 blocks of street with no questions asked. And there are food supplies available in this area. Last night, I only had about 20 feet of street at my disposal, and only a pharmacy open in that zone.

I stopped at a café and saw a bit of a local talk show that seemed to be stoking the flames rather than quenching them: footage was being shown of Algerians ransacking an Egyptian office in Algiers, and then they cut back to the studio, where the three head-shaking hosts were sitting at a table with a large Egyptian flag for a tablecloth: not the most responsible act of journalism at a time like this.

I’m actually not sure if anything is going on in Algiers right now. They did win the match, and that presumably changes the dynamics a bit (the biggest outrages in Algeria occurred right after their loss in the qualifier in Cairo).

And this is something that has often struck foreigners as odd about the United States, where we riot after winning more than after losing. I saw some pretty crazy stuff happen in Chicago after each of the Jordan/Bulls titles.