last night was worse than I thought

Just received a phone call from Catarina, my Portuguese colleague in the Philosophy Department, who also happens to live in Zamalek. She left on vacation this morning to a desert oasis, and saw the rubble on the 26th of July at about 8 AM, a couple of hours before I went and thought there wasn’t much to report.

Au contraire, says Catarina, who saw ruined cars, shredded billboards, and even my favorite local shoe store smashed to pieces and hundreds of pairs of shoes removed.

There is also THE FOLLOWING BBC PIECE suggesting that things aren’t getting much better. That talk show I saw earlier, which struck me as needlessly inflammatory, seems to be merely reflecting the public mood here, which I really think is excessive, despite my great love for the Egyptian people. They need to calm down. Threatening to withdraw from international football for 2 years will only hurt Egypt, no one else.

The story also says that police were hit with firebombs on my street last night. I must have slept through it, since I had the heat turned up pretty loudly (it was cold last night and is becoming cold again).