report from the square

I was in Tahrir from the end of Friday prayers through a portion of today’s victory celebration. They hoped to have a million people again, and they were well on their way to it when I left (the crowd was immobilizing and the sun far too hot for how I dressed, Zamalek having been much cooler when I left the house).

Popcorn for sale everywhere, and cold drinks. Also for sale in large quantities: Egyptian flags, and posters with photographs of the revolutionary martyrs. Having compiled the photo gallery of the dead on this very blog, I had the strange experience of recognizing almost every photograph on the posters, as well as knowing their names and the exact cause and day of death.

Military presence was surprisingly light, with just three or so tanks guarding the Qasr al-Nil bridge where I entered. Soldiers were checking everyone entering, but they turned out to have no interest in seeing any identification from me; they were mostly just checking purses and bags, for weapons I suppose.

The soldiers do have a certain air of competence and trustworthiness about them, I must say. They are ruggedly athletic and friendly young men who also happen to be suckers for children. Egypt is already a child-loving culture a bit beyond most countries, but every little girl who chanted a political slogan was either smiled at or lifted off the ground by a soldier, and the little boys all got to sit on top of the tanks. In short, the army today was behaving more like a group of Boy Scout leaders than like a military force in a revolution.

The NDP Headquarters is something to see. The outside looks to be standing solidly enough, but the inside is purely burnt to a crisp. I believe there were at least three separate arson incidents there.

It was too crowded for me to work my way over to the south and see what’s happening at Parliament, but I doubt very much is happening down there now.

As you may have noticed on some of the NY Times diagrams, there is a huge portion of Tahrir mapped as a kind of empty no-man’s land. That’s the large perennial construction zone in front of the Museum, which has been under construction since shortly after my arrival in 2000, with no signs of much progress being made. But today I saw that people had, predictably, broken into that zone during the revolution. I walked in there myself, like a naughty 10-year-old, exploring an area I had never seen before. Many of the barriers around the construction site were obviously pilfered to use in constructing the barricades against the thugs, who were generally based to the north of the square.