Jasmine and Fire (22 page)

I land in Cairo around noon after the short flight, and in the afternoon I visit the Egyptian Museum, where I explore the mummy exhibits and peer into cases holding the fossilized remains of foods (beans, grains, prunes) that are, amazingly, still recognizable even though they date back millennia. I take an early drive that Tuesday morning to see the pyramids in nearby Giza before heading to Alexandria. Thanks to the nearly nonexistent crowds in Giza at the crack of dawn, the pyramids seem to rise up suddenly, almost unexpectedly, out of the dry and empty desert. After seeing so much film footage of them, I’m still startled by their almost cartoonishly large size and domineering presence. The view is
unspoiled by crowds of tour buses, which I’m sure will start jamming the area within an hour. I’d wondered if the pyramids would be disappointing. But as I sit on a rock alone, staring up at the 450-foot-tall structures, built in the third millennium
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, I start to think:
Whatever happens to Lebanon now, and whatever happens in Cairo during today’s protests, will soon enough be buried in the dust, just like the pharaohs and all their worries and their belongings and the remnants of a once-dynamic civilization that’s now stone and dirt
. I suspect I’m not the first person to have had these thoughts while staring up at the Giza pyramids. But the visit puts things in perspective like nothing else has done for me in weeks, and it turns out to be just the mind-bending experience I need after a rocky few weeks in Lebanon.

I head to Alexandria in the late morning, in time to escape the protests scheduled to kick off in downtown Cairo today. When I arrive and drop off my bags in my hotel room, I walk across the street to Alexandria’s main waterfront boulevard overlooking the Mediterranean, and I stroll along for a few minutes, enjoying the soft breeze and staring out at ships in the sea. Suddenly I hear yells coming from behind me. I turn around and spot a small crowd forming about a quarter-mile away. I continue walking forward, looking over my shoulder every few seconds to see what’s happening, and I notice the crowd keeps growing. Now it’s tripled, quadrupled, and it’s looking more like a riot, a mass of what appear to be mostly Egyptian men in their twenties and thirties streaming toward the waterfront in the direction where I’m walking. Moments later throngs of riot police, dressed in black, appear out of nowhere, running in from all sides and lining up in rows as they try to contain the thickening crowd.

I’m stunned at how the scene has just transformed, in minutes,
from a calm, sunlit weekday-afternoon tableau—locals strolling, a smattering of tourists taking pictures of the curvy boulevard overlooking the sea—into a flash mob. As the crowd continues to grow and fill the area that stretches from the palm-encircled plaza near my hotel all the way across the boulevard to the shore, shouting protest slogans I can barely make out in all the ruckus, the riot police form a giant barrier around the crowd, and some cops are running amok in the middle, shoving people to the ground, holding batons and teargas canisters.

The protests haven’t been confined to Cairo today, then. I later find out Alexandria is better known for its history of radical politics and activism than is Cairo, so no wonder the Egyptian uprising would kick off simultaneously in Alexandria. But right now there’s no time for second-guessing my decision to come here. I need to disentangle myself from this thickening riot, pronto, or I’m going to be teargassed.

So far on this trip I’ve been speaking mostly Arabic, glad to be in an Arab country where people want to speak the native language with you—especially if they can tell that you speak it, too. No stubborn attempts to switch to English or French here in Egypt, not like in Beirut. My Arabic, even though I’m struggling a little with the Egyptian dialect, has already improved more in my two days here than it did in my first two months in Beirut. But on this particular afternoon in Alexandria, it comes in handy to be a foreigner, even an American one. It’s not always the wisest move to loudly proclaim your Americanness in Arab countries that have a dicey foreign relations history with the United States, but at this particular moment in January 2011—partly because of the truce signed between Egypt’s former president Anwar Sadat and Israel’s ex-premier Menachem Begin at Camp David, Maryland, in 1978,
and also because of the $2 billion in aid money the United States has been sending Egypt every year—the Egyptian regime and America are on decent terms. At the moment, the government is blaming mainly Egyptian civilians for the unrest, not foreigners just yet.

As I run to get out of the crowd, I come smack up against a riot cop who is blocking my way. He and his cohorts are holding their plastic shields end to end and creating an impenetrable barrier around the entire area. I opt for the I’m-an-American pose.

“Please, please, I’m a tourist,” I beg the policeman in my best American accent, standing barely an inch from his plastic shield and the baton he’s about to start swinging. I’m wondering if I have any chance of getting out of here before who-knows-what hell gets unleashed.

The policeman looks at me for a second. The riot cop standing next to him looks, too, says something to the other cop, and they both stand there, glowering at me. Then, ten seconds later—feels like an hour—they part their shields for a split second to let me pass.

I duck out of the mob and onto the other side of the police barrier, as the voices of the cops and the protesters merge into a louder and louder din. I’m relieved to be out of there, but wondering what may happen moments from now to the Alexandrians stuck inside the riot-police trap. They’ve potentially risked their lives to come out here and demonstrate against Hosni Mubarak and his cruel thirty-year dictatorship. For the first time since he took power, Egyptians may finally have the chance—now that a revolutionary movement has obviously built up enough momentum to get people into the streets today—to take back their country.

But clouds and clouds of teargas are about to engulf the crowd,
it turns out, and from a short distance away, I can see police officers beating protesters with batons. By this point I’m much farther along on the boulevard, walking fast—not running, don’t want to attract suspicion, but walking as fast as I’ve ever walked in my life—until I can’t see or hear or sense the riots anymore.

But that evening I accidentally find out what getting teargassed feels like. As I’m riding the Alexandria tram to a café, through the streets of the atmospheric city—elegant townhouses darkened by smog, and old coffee shops and bric-a-brac stores and pastry shops, all crammed side by side along the sidewalks, the scent of coffee in the air and the sea in the near distance—I hear someone yell, “Close your eyes!” Suddenly I feel a painful burning in my eyeballs and nostrils. Teargas is seeping in through the open windows; must be another raging mob of riot cops trying to break up a crowd. All the passengers cover their faces and duck. In a minute or two, the gas dissipates, and my eyes and nose are still itching but no longer on fire. One woman is having trouble breathing and scrambles out at the next stop. I continue along to the café.

What am I doing riding the tram to a coffee shop, in the middle of the historic Egyptian revolution of 2011? A fair question. But in those first few days of the uprising, as hard as it is to imagine now, there was still mostly a business-as-usual feel, apart from the scattered protests. I remember that feeling from the occasionally calm stretches of the civil war in Lebanon. When the mayhem temporarily dies down, whether it’s for a day or for a few hours, you’re not sure if something terrible is about to happen or if things are settling back down, so you try to go about your life. You run your errands and go to school or work if you can. In Lebanon during the war, you’d try to visit your friends and relatives, especially if you’ve been cooped up for hours or days in a basement shelter
or at home. You take care of day-to-day business, more or less, as best you can manage and for as long as you can. In Alexandria, things seemed calm again that day, in between the protests, and so I tried to go on with my plans.

But Egypt isn’t used to chaos on this level and hasn’t seen it for decades, and the café where I’ve agreed to meet up with Raya, the guide I scheduled to take me around tomorrow, turns out to be nearly empty tonight. I spot Raya, a pretty brunette in her midthirties wearing glasses and a purple head scarf, sitting at a table alone. I ask her if our plan is really still on for tomorrow, and she assures me everything will be fine; the riots today were probably just a blip. But I notice there’s an anxious expression on her face as she excuses herself to call home and check on her kids. When she comes back, she tells me about the history of one of the sites she’s taking me to tomorrow: the Alexandria Library, the most prestigious of its time when it was built in the third century
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; Julius Caesar burned it down in the first century
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, and it reopened in its current location just ten years ago.

Later that evening, as I’m just steps from my hotel, I hear more crowd noises and look back to see another throng forming down the street, holding up antiregime posters and chanting protest slogans. Cops are running in to break it up. This crowd is smaller than the riot I’d witnessed earlier, but it’s scary—even if a little thrilling—to be so close to the action. I’m glad I’m safely back at the hotel.

The next morning the city feels quiet again, and according to the local news I hear in my hotel room, there are no reports of more demonstrations breaking out. I continue with my plans to see the Alexandria Library and National Museum that day. Raya picks me up in her car and shows me around the library’s soaring,
glassy new building and high-tech research facilities, and then takes me to the museum to see the collection of ancient jewelry and weapons from the days of Alexander the Great and Antony and Cleopatra. In the afternoon, I take a taxi back to Cairo. It feels like a normal Wednesday in Alexandria and along the highway.

In the early evening, as the cab pulls into Cairo, driving near the edge of Tahrir Square to take me to my hotel a couple of miles away, I start hearing loud crowd noises again. Suddenly streams of protesters come running out along the sidewalk past the now-stopped traffic, yelling “Gas, gas!” Clouds of teargas are blowing past our taxi, and masses of riot police are chasing after the demonstrators. My taxi driver just grunts and complains about the slow-moving traffic. I’m amazed he’s only focusing on that, but he’s an elderly driver (looks to be in his eighties) in an Arab country. He’s probably seen some unrest in his day; maybe he was even driving a cab during the last Egyptian revolution, back in 1952.

I roll the taxi window shut on my side, and when the driver finally makes it to my hotel, I spend hours in my room that night flipping between the TV news stations: Al-Jazeera from Qatar, Al-Arabiya from Saudia Arabia, and CNN International. The protests have hit both Cairo and Alexandria again on this Wednesday evening, and the crowds have been growing, the cops getting more ruthless with batons and teargas. They haven’t started shooting live bullets into the crowds yet; that will come later in the week. The cities are not yet swept up in giant masses of sit-ins. The Cairo protests in those first few days are happening mostly in the evenings and are still confined to certain parts of town, mostly around Tahrir Square.

Thursday morning: it’s quiet again in Cairo. As I drink coffee
in my room at the hotel where I’m staying, I read in the paper that the protesters are planning to resume the demonstrations tomorrow, Friday, after the noon mosque prayers. I’m relieved that I’ll be heading out by then. As much as I wholeheartedly support the uprising, I don’t want to be anywhere near the mayhem. I guess there’s a reason I’m not a war reporter. Although the riots breaking out here are quite different from the war violence I grew up with in Lebanon, the atmosphere of chaos and danger makes me want to bolt, not pull out my notepad.

Speaking of Lebanon, the country has had some more hiccups in the past week, while I’ve been away. On the news in my Alexandria hotel room one night, I watched footage of an anti-Hezbollah demonstration in Beirut earlier that day—rioters protesting the group’s antitribunal actions had burned tires on the streets. But the situation there seems to be calming back down.

My Egypt trip has been incredibly memorable—more than I could’ve imagined—and I’m desperate to come back here so I can explore the country better and hopefully do more travel reporting once the situation settles a bit. Even though I’m ready to return to Beirut now, I feel lucky to have been in Egypt at the start of a historic uprising. I got to watch as thousands, and eventually millions, of Egyptians risked their lives to try to transform their country—their home—into a place where they can live, thrive, have a future. I realize that it’s one thing to leave the city where you’re living and search for home somewhere else; it’s an entirely more difficult, and arguably much more courageous, decision to stay put under tough conditions and go up against terrifying odds to transform your home for the better.

By the time I arrive in Beirut, a new prime minister is in place:
Najib Miqati, a Sunni multimillionaire from the north, who took office after the previous prime minister, the late Rafik Hariri’s son Saad, was forced out by the government collapse earlier in the month. Miqati is trying to form a new cabinet by bringing together the opposing political parties, and there’s some optimism that he’ll get them to meet halfway, rebuild the government, and potentially agree to terms regarding the still-unreleased results of the tribunal.

I wonder, now that things may be settling down again, if it’s time for the inevitable new round of Lebanon travel stories. True, there’ve been only a few weeks of instability this time, and no violence or war to recover from yet, but “Beirut Emerges from Conflict to Party Once More!” is an eminently recyclable story, and editors always need material. Journalists: Ready, set, go!

Meanwhile, it’s looking like Richard can come visit in a week after all. Or, I wonder, should I play it extrasafe and talk him out of it? Selfishly, I don’t want to, but I’m a little nervous.