Egyptian reflections on last night's violence

Egyptian newspapers from today. Left: "Egypt," dripping blood.

Right: "Egypt bleeds at Maspero," the site of last night's clashes.

Last night marked the deadliest incident of violence in Egypt since February's uprising, and throughout it all I sat gripped to my computer screen safe and sound in my apartment about a mile or two away from the fighting. Needless to say, I kind of gave up on homework.

Believe it or not, though, my classes started on time this morning, despite the fact that a curfew for my campus's downtown neighborhood had only expired two hours before. Talk of the clashes predictably took place throughout the day, particularly since many of the professors and administrators in my program are Copts, or Egyptian Christians. I wanted to share a few exchanges I had today about the violence; these views are by no means a representative sample of Egyptian society as a whole, but they do reflect a few different slices of the population.

Right off the bat this morning, my Egyptian colloquial Arabic professor, who is a Coptic Christian, seemed a bit anxious as we began class. He described the clashes in the greater context of the systemic discrimination Copts face every day. Shutting the door so passers-by wouldn't overhear, he told us he had heard two people on the subway discussing the violence. How did they characterize it? he asked rhetorically. "They said that there were Christian people who provoked it all."

My professor's young daughters, who attend school near the epicenter of the clashes, stayed home from classes today. "Are you afraid for your personal safety?" I asked. His reply came immediately: "I'm not scared—I'm angry."

But in a time when sectarian tensions could rise rapidly, there are rays of hope. Two classes and one eggplant sandwich after that first conversation, my Muslim professor sat down before us and apologized for not having prepared a formal lesson plan. At around 8 p.m. last night, he explained, just after the fighting broke out, his Christian friend instant messaged him with the news. Troubled by what they heard, the two jumped into a taxi to head downtown. No can do, said the cabbie, it's chaos down there. So they asked him to take them to the Coptic hospital, to which he obliged. "By the way," my professor added, "the taxi driver had been listening to Qur'anic verses on the radio at the time."

At the hospital, though, my professor and his friend encountered kids no more than 10 years old running with wooden sticks in their hands. Discouraged and concerned that the scene could deteriorate, they turned back.

So, visibly effected by what he had witnessed and heard the day before, my professor led us through an analysis of how state television had biased its coverage against the Christians, and of the prime minister's late-night statement about the clashes. At the end of class, he rushed out so he could make it to the funerals of the Copts who died yesterday, which were just getting underway.

Then, later this evening, my two taxi drivers shared their thoughts on the clashes, which they said were undoubtedly bad for Egypt. Both expressed frustration with events that seemed out of their control. Why can't protests occur peacefully, with no destruction? one pondered.

The other driver offered a rather fitting analogy. "Our government is like a fireman," he said. "They only put water on the flames after the fire starts—they don't do anything to prevent it."

F16s fly in formation over Tahrir, make lots of noise

It takes a lot of noise to make Cairenes break from their day-to-day routines and turn their attention elsewhere, as this city's daily dose of honking, shouting, braying, falafel-munching, etc. rivals the decibel level of a rock concert. But pause and gaze skyward a lot of Egyptians in central Cairo did on Tuesday and Wednesday, as fighter jets flew in formation over the city in a show of force and celebration ahead of Thursday's Armed Forces Day.

Observed annually on October 6, the national holiday marks the anniversary of Egypt's victory in the first couple days of its 1973 war with Israel. What the military leaves out is October 9 to 25, when Egyptian forces fared somewhat less successfully. Put it this way: It's kind of like if Japan commemorated the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor as the day they beat the United States in World War II.

But the holiday is just as much about demonstrating the current power of the armed forces as it is about selectively ignoring history, and there's no doubt that last week's display had particular relevance as a council of generals continues to hold on to power in Egypt. With extensive economic holdings, strong ties to Egyptian political leaders over the last 60 years, and a compulsory draft of most young Egyptian men, the military remains a major pillar of the Egyptian state. Military leaders are intent on keeping it that way even as protestors more often and more pointedly direct their anger at the ruling generals themselves.

If only they didn't have to show off their prowess as I attempt to cross the street in downtown Cairo. Do you know how hard it is to avoid getting hit by a bus as you try to take a photo of a F16 soaring overhead?

Lions and tigers and really sad bears. Oh my...

The Giza zoo was just as depressing as I had expected it to be. Based on the uncaring way the average Egyptian treats street cats and dogs here—and the lack of pets in most Egyptian homes—I didn't hold out much hope for my trip to the city zoo last week, and disappoint the zoo did not.

Cairo is, in fact, located in Africa, so we're a bit closer to the source of all the cool game that is part and parcel of the zoo experience in the United States: hippos, tigers, and sweet African antelope, to name a few. The Giza zoo had all of the above with a splash of urban fauna, like the wild street cats darting in and out of enclosures, or the German shepherd exhibit for which it appeared that random dogs had been plucked off the street and placed in cages.

Despite its exotic pull, though, the zoo was pretty sad. Great black bears continuously circled cages not much larger than a couple rooms in my apartment, striving to break free; smoking zoo workers sat by enclosures with lettuce and sticks in hand, encouraging little kids to feed the animals in exchange for some bakshish (a tip) from their parents; and kids stuck their hands through cages, trying to pet the animals.

(If you can't see the video, click here.)

For a couple of the only foreign tourists in the entire place, it was almost more fascinating observing the Egyptian zoo-goers in their natural habitat than checking out the animals. Picture enormous families whipping out blankets, hookahs, full meals, and more, setting up camp anywhere they could find free space and some shade. Kids ran crazily from exhibit to exhibit, there was face painting at every turn, and women in niqabs dodged soccer balls flying through the air.

And I got to hold a baby lion cub! For only $3.50, you can take photos with a baby lion and have a cool story for friends. Or so we thought. The lion cubs were actually, as we should have expected, pretty malnourished looking and probably drugged so they wouldn't munch on our hands. Afterward, my friend Tyler and I walked away trying to justify to ourselves that what we had just done was OK. "We had to do it. I feel dirty... but we had to do it! We won't tell anyone or put the pictures online, though." It was like we had just killed someone and were trying to justify the murder to ourselves.

I kind of feel the same way post-zoo. I had to do it, but feel a little dirty afterward. I guess that feeling of disgust is included in the ticket price.

I saw literally every one of these rules repeatedly broken, save for the ban on fishing—which should have probably gone without saying anyway AT A ZOO. For example:

Snail down! Repeat, snail down!

Beads of sweat dripped from the tip of my nose, whizzed through the air, and hit the sizzling cobblestone with a splash. I wiped my brow with a red, yellow, and blue bandana, decorated with a picture of an intimidating snail on the front. I watched my perspiration vaporize upon hitting the ground.

That morning, we had boarded a bus chuck-full of Australian backpackers looking for exactly what we were: a medieval, violent, Bacchanalian horserace that we had no hope of fully comprehending. Four hours later, it seemed like we might evaporate ourselves before witnessing the most majestic equine-friendly tradition Tuscany has ever known.

The Palio, a 355 year-old horserace steeped in complex medieval pageantry and partying, pits 10 of Siena's 14 neighborhoods, or contrade, against each other in a three-lap, bareback contest circling the city's central square. Twice each summer, the neighborhoods undergo days of preparation and feasting, with generally good-natured rivalries coming to a head on the day of the race.

Not all is fun and games, though, as townspeople have a history of drugging each other's horses or beating up jockeys just before the competition. Pushing, shoving, and smacking throughout the race itself—with jockeys making alliances to assure the defeat of rivals—elevates the Palio and its boisterous awesomeness to a league of its own.

After trial runs in the lead-up to the big day, townspeople from the different contrade, sporting symbols like dragons, the forest, or a she-wolf, don medieval garb and march through the town's circuitous streets. Singing children and flag-bearers lead their neighborhood's parade to a church, where a priest blesses the contrada's horse and wishes it good luck.

The benediction of the horse is seriously serious—"a particularly delicate and sensitive moment," our tourist pamphlet warned with not hint of sarcasm. "[D]uring the presence of the horse in the church, ABSOLUTE QUIET IS REQUIRED." Images of a drunken Australian mounting a sanctified steed flashed through my mind.

(If you can't see the video, click here.)

Back in the main square, an absurdly long pageant complete with gratuitous amounts of flag tossing ended when 10 horses, 10 jockeys, and zero saddles emerged on the clay-covered course and trotted up to the starting line. I readjusted my sweat-covered bandana and looked down at the picture of the long-necked, determined snail staring back at me.

The second we had seen the snail earlier that day, we knew that that contrada was our contrada. Come on, a snail competing in a test of speed? Taking cues from a Chinese restaurant placemat, our pamphlet had informed us the snail's enemy was the no-less-ironic tortoise.

"Go snail!" we screamed among 30,000 tourists and locals packing the square, leaning forward and sweating on each other with bated breath.

And then... there were about a billion false starts. And then... they were off!

(If you can't see the video, click here.)

While the race lasted less than 90 seconds, the course's two straight-up 90 degree turns did not disappoint. On the last lap, a two- or three-horse pileup sent jockeys flying everywhere, and a couple horses finished the race without a human on top (completely allowed). But looking closer, we discovered—oh no!—the snail horse had crashed!

The Palio hooligans left us no time to sulk, however, as throngs of young and old Sienese rushed the course, picked fights with each other, and mobbed the winning jockey, who hailed from the giraffe contrada. Stupid giraffe.

(If you can't see the video, click here.)

(If you can't see the video, click here.)

Our day witnessing living history ended with a night of raucous party-crashing, pizza-eating, and piazza-storming as we wandered the serpentine Sienese alleyways (ok, maybe more pizza-ing than partying...).

Throughout the day and into the evening, the seriousness with which the Sienese approached the Palio kept throwing us for a loop. At one point after the race, Justin swore he saw a teenage boy sitting on the side of the road in the elephant contrada, slumped over and crying into his hands. A sense of defeat enveloped people in a nearby bar, where Italian television broadcast footage of the race on repeat.

Meanwhile, the giraffe contrada was livin' it up. Bells rang loud, kids rapped on drums, and the prize of the Palio—a giant silk banner—hung in the neighborhood's main church.

Good for them. There's always next year, though. Or the 353 years after that.

Adventures in Italy, Part II (abridged)

I originally typed up a longer post about the rest of the Italian half of my summer trip, but (1) I accidentally deleted it; (2) I have lots of homework now; (3) a long post about my stereotypical European vacation is probably not super engaging anyway; and (4) speaking Arabic all the time is slowly eating away at my ability to communicate lucidly in English. So instead of rewriting that lost post, I'm going to take a page from the notebook of my sister Amanda, who signs her blog posts with a few words or phrases that are on her mind at the time. Enjoy!

Palermo (Sicily): Spur of the moment flight to Sicily, mob bosses, mob hats, fried swordfish, gritty streets.

Grill, salt, olive oil, serve.

Siracusa (Sicily): Ancient, empty Greek and Roman ruins, fried-eggplant hostel cooking, random beach with locals.

The locals used to sacrifice animals and other locals here.

Catania (Sicily): Fish market, transvestite prostitutes, Justin's wallet stolen.

Catania train station

Justin on the phone with Canada, post-theft

"This money belt thingamajig could prove useful!"

Overnight bus to Naples: Ferry, sleep, window seat.

Naples: Heavenly pizza, trash piles on the street (they've got nothing on Cairo's trash piles), extremely sketchy, crime-invested.

Naples in a nutshell (sans pizza)

Pompeii: Unbelievably vast site, ceramic casts of dead Pompeians, incredibly well preserved.

Rome: Tango by the Trevi Fountain, almost getting kicked out of a sovereign state (i.e. the Vatican), bargaining with Bangladeshis for roses, Sistine Chapel, Segways, LOTS of awesome ruins.

Dome of St. Peter's Basilica

 The Map Room, the Vatican Museums

 Near the Pantheon

The Ara Pacis Museum 

 Cruising around the Villa Borghese park

The Vatican Museums

Egypt on alert after rioters storm Israeli embassy

After a long Ramadan of somewhat lackluster protests that were particularly hampered by the violent breakup of the Tahrir Square sit-in in early August, demonstrators returned to the square yesterday under the slogan "Correcting the Path." I stopped by the rally in the late afternoon and was surprised at the decent turnout, particularly after conversations with Egyptians over the last week or two had revealed a sense of weariness with continued protests.

This time, though, tons of hardcore soccer fans bolstered the demonstrators' numbers; violent clashes between fans and police after a game this week had spurred the fans on to participate yesterday. The hooligans, if you will, are called "Ultras," and they creatively turned some of their well-known chants and songs into anti-Ministry of Interior and anti-Mubarak chants.

(If you can't see the video, click here.)

A little later at dinner in a quiet neighborhood a few blocks away from Tahrir, my Egyptian friend got a call informing him that another protest in front of the Israeli embassy a couple miles away had turned ugly, as police started beating back protestors who tore down part of a newly built concrete security barrier around the residential building that houses the Israeli embassy. On our walk back to Tahrir, we passed groups of young people clad in Egyptian flags hailing cabs to "assifara alisra'iliya"—the Israeli embassy.

The embassy back in June. It occupies the top floors of a residential building overlooking the Nile.

Egyptians have been demonstrating outside the embassy for weeks now in respsonse to Israel killing five Egyptian soldiers while pursuing gunmen across the border following a terror attack in southern Israel that left eight people dead. Among their demands are that the Israeli ambassador leave the country and the embassy shut down.

Back at home on my awesome roof above the streets of Dokki—a neighborhood kind of between Tahrir and the embassy—we saw dark smoke rising against the night sky, coming from the direction of the Israeli mission and a nearby police station we heard was on fire. The sound of sirens filled the air, and we began to see protestors running down a street near our building in the direction of the embassy.

But the protestors seemed to have been turned back at some point, and all of the sudden we saw 50 to 100 black-clad riot policemen marching down the street. We live right by a relatively quiet police station, and it looked like that was where they came from. The policemen banged loudly on their shields as they made their way toward the embassy. It was an eery sight.

Next, we heard from friends who live a bit closer to the embassy that they inhaled some tear gas as they stood on their balcony listening to Molotov cocktails explode from a few blocks away. I fell asleep following the developments on Twitter.

All in all, reports said the riot at the embassy left a few people dead and hundreds injured. About 30 protestors reportedly made it up into one of the lower floors of the embassy itself, throwing down hundreds of documents in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The falling white documents reminded me of my first snow day in Cairo.

Israel ended up evacuating nearly all of its 80 diplomatic staff in Egypt, including the ambassador and his family, according to reports. Egypt declared a state of alert, and the prime minister and his cabinet might tender his resignation this afternoon.

It's amazing how quickly things can blow up. While I doubt popular anger at Israel will translate into another uprising, last night's events leave one to wonder what type of incident could actually set off a new set of mass protests in Egypt, igniting the tinder box of popular discontent at the ever-deteriorating economy and political process.

As Egyptians are fond of saying, "Rabbina yestoorna"—may God protect us.

Adventures in Italy, Part I

After our epic adventure in the Pyrenees, Justin and I were ready for a good three weeks of world-class museums, humongous churches, and mouth-watering pizza, maybe with a few canals thrown in on the side. We weren’t exactly sure where to go, but then someone suggested Italy and we were set. Some highlights:

Barcelona

Before leaving España, we visited the capital of Catalonia. We wandered across the city exploring bizarrely playful and curvy buildings and parks designed by Antoni Gaudí, including his masterpiece cathedral, the Sagrada Família. After eating dinner by the beach, we stayed out clubbing until we had to leave for the airport at 4 a.m. for an early-morning flight.

The interior of the Sagrada Família

The cathedral's trippy Nativity Facade

Ahh! Seafood at the Boqueria Market

Venice

After a funny train ride sandwiched between an Italian DJ and his Harley Davidson-riding, silver-capped teeth-sporting, football-playing friend, we attended Friday night services in a grand, ornate synagogue in the heart of the Jewish Ghetto and then ate a free dinner with tons of tourists at the local Chabad’s restaurant. Fun fact: The word "ghetto" is derived from the Italian for "foundry," as there were a bunch of foundries in the Venetian neighborhood where they moved all the Jews. Fun fact #2: The Venetian Ghetto is the oldest in the world, dating from 1516. At the also really old synagogue, the rabbi delivered the sermon in Italian and Hebrew, simultaneously translating every couple sentences.

We wandered around canals and alleyways the next day, then on Sunday attended Mass at the famous San Marco’s Bacilica. It’s way more interesting to see people use old religious buildings than it is to quickly shuffle in and out of them with no understanding of their original purpose.

Venice was spectacular, but it was approximately 99.3 percent tourists and 0.7 percent Venetians who worked in the tourism industry. It reminded us of Disneyworld.

Outside St. Mark's Basilica (if you can't see the video, click here)

Florence

Michelangelo’s David wowed us—they really nailed the lighting—the Uffizi art gallery overwhelmed us, and one massive, juicy, perfect Florentine steak stuffed us. The Duomo, one of the largest cathedral domes in the world, would have probably been spectacular had we not repeatedly arrived at the church doors only to find it was closed.

Me and Machiavelli

One and a half kilos of goodness

Cinque Terre

Probably my favorite stop during our five-week trip, Cinque Terre consists of five fishing villages squished between perilous cliffs on the western coast of Italy. Visitors can hike between the towns on paths along the coasts or take trains and ferries from one to another.

My Cinque Terre memories include accidentally hiking down to a beautiful nude beach—and jumping right in, if you will—and doing yoga for the first time ever, early in the morning on a rock alongside crystal-clear water lapping against a cliff. Our hostel room was about 20 feet from the water, and you could actually see its door in postcard photos of the town we stayed in.

Our room, center right.

Pisa

After a fleetingly short time in Cinque Terre, we spent an even less time in Pisa. Snapped some classic photos and peaced:

 Strike a pose!

To be continued…