Tahrir & AUC
We took a stroll through Tahrir, and past AUC, on 16 December. Afterwards, I kept asking myself: "what the hell were we thinking?!"
There were no demonstrations, no tear gas, no protests. Yet, we were clearly in the wrong place (even if at the "right time" - i.e., a time of no imminent danger). Still, when a fight did break out on the street, a fight that "in normal times" would be handled easily, and ended peacefully - this one started boiling over and getting more heated. We simply got out of there before it got worse. And we were being "nudged" (firmly!) to get a move-on by an elderly gent who was pushing us down a side street, where he was headed also.
So, we moved back through the side streets, past McDonald's and AUC-of-old, and as we did so, a very young boy started pulling the barbed wire across the street. (The next morning we learned from the newspapers that Tahrir was "shut off" from what few streets still had traffic. Nothing horrible happened while we were there, but we were smart to get out as soon as we got in.)
There were no demonstrations, no tear gas, no protests. Yet, we were clearly in the wrong place (even if at the "right time" - i.e., a time of no imminent danger). Still, when a fight did break out on the street, a fight that "in normal times" would be handled easily, and ended peacefully - this one started boiling over and getting more heated. We simply got out of there before it got worse. And we were being "nudged" (firmly!) to get a move-on by an elderly gent who was pushing us down a side street, where he was headed also.
So, we moved back through the side streets, past McDonald's and AUC-of-old, and as we did so, a very young boy started pulling the barbed wire across the street. (The next morning we learned from the newspapers that Tahrir was "shut off" from what few streets still had traffic. Nothing horrible happened while we were there, but we were smart to get out as soon as we got in.)
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