So if any of you were following the news about Egypt you saw that there were thousands of protesters all over downtown last night. I’m sure you probably know more of the details than we do since Egypt blocked Twitter, shut down access to Facebook for a while, and wasn’t showing much on the news.
When I signed back into Facebook this evening many of my Egypt friends had posted notes to their families saying, “Thanks for all the phone calls and notes of concern. We are fine.” Hey! I didn’t get any phone calls or notes of concern! What, were you all too busy watching J-Lo and Steven Tyler on AI? Or for those of you not related to me, were you busy watching the State of the Union address? Just teasing. I know we are well loved.
So last night things looked like they were going to be a Very. Big. Deal. The protesters were going to stay out all night, fast food places were providing free food, people in the area were unlocking their wifi connections so that people could still report from the square since Egypt had shut down cell phone service in the downtown area. Well, we woke up to nothing. Around 1 am the cops moved in to shut down the sit in. They unloaded tear gas, rubber bullets, and beat sticks on the crowd and they chased them all off.
A point a friend of ours made was when people are desperate and protesting because they are financially destitute, they can’t afford to protest on a work day because they need every pound they can possibly earn to survive. So today was business as usual. We’ll see if anything picks up again over the weekend.
In the meantime, life in Maadi is normal. Josh and the boys are at basketball practice, I have self-defense class tomorrow morning, and we’re still waiting on our shipment and our car. Josh and I were laughing because there was an interview on the news last night with one of the Ministers of Foreign something-or-other and I asked, “Those aren’t the people who have to clear our shipment, are they?” Yep, sure enough. So even if our shipment makes it from whoever has it to the Ministry of Foreign blah-de-blah, I’m sure this event isn’t helping to get our paperwork approved.
I wanted to post 2 pictures of Josh and Camille watching the news together — Josh watching, Camille sacked out on his chest, but I can’t get anything to upload. I’m just going to blame it on the Egyptian government.
**** They just restored Twitter and now I can post pictures again. Maybe my problem was related. And according to Twitter and youtube videos, people are out protesting again.
