assessment of the Cairo streets right now

I’d heard today that the army was going to “secure” Road 90, the highwayesque 4-lane street running from the new AUC Campus to the busy Ring Road. There have been some moderately violent muggings on the backstreets of the city, with escaped (or intentionally released?) prisoners still at large.

A friend of a friend, an Egyptian woman, was in a good neighborhood yesterday when two thugs on a motorcycle stole her purse and broke her arm in throwing her to the ground. You have to understand that the crime rate in Cairo is generally quite low. Egyptians sometimes complain about how dangerous it is here, but trust me: Cairo is Candyland compared with any large American city.

Road 90 looked perfectly secure and normal, though I saw no military presence there at all. Closer into the city, however, the tanks and armored personnel carriers start to show up. There aren’t enough of them to feel oppressive, though, and the attitude of the soldiers is reassuringly bored and friendly.

All in all, it feels like any other normal Cairo evening, except that the military is now running the country, and there is a midnight curfew that seems to be a bit more serious than the widely flouted curfew of the main revolutionary period.