Dear readers,
This is post #1 of the shorter entries
that I'm going to write from now on, since I no longer have the time to
write blog entries as long as the ones that I've posted so far.
The theme of this post is in the title. You readers have almost
certainly heard that Mohammed Morsi has been elected president of Egypt,
because his victory was, as Joe Biden might say (when censored), a Big
Freaking Deal. What a time to be in Egypt, let alone in a city that I
keep hearing referred to as "The Muslim Brotherhood Stronghold"!
Needless to say, being in the center of the city when his victory was
announced was absolutely insane.
My classes (which I'll talk about in a later post) go
from 9am to 3pm, but on the day of the elections, we were told by the
program coordinator to go home early, and then we were confined to the
hotel, not allowed to go outside. (Our dinner was ordered for delivery
from a shawarma place in the area.) Things were a little bit tense in
our group before the results were announced; we didn't know whether
violence would erupt, we didn't know if we'd be safe (though most of us
were pretty sure we would be), and we knew that in the worst case
scenario, we'd get sent back to a Georgetown campus, either in DC or in
Qatar. One of the other students checked out a window about an hour
before the results came in and said that there was absolutely no one on
the street, which, for those who haven't been to a big Egyptian city, is
like looking outside in New York and seeing no signs of life. Creepy.
For two or three hours in the afternoon, we gathered around the TV to
wait for news.
None
of us were fluent enough to read the ticker, but we could at least read
the relevant words: election, announcement, and the name of the eventual
winner. When they announced it was Morsi, the noise from outside --
which is loud 24/7 anyway -- increased tenfold. Cheers rung out from
outside. We started to hear fireworks. And for the rest of the day, we
ignored our homework and watched the celebration from our hotel room
balconies. The rejoicing (and noise) didn't calm down until about 3 or 4
in the morning.
Some of us (not including me) got photos of
passers-by carrying a banner with
Morsi’s face on it, down the Corniche. Others were able to capture some
pretty interesting (and slightly creepy) effigies that the crowd made,
of the judges who voted to dissolve Parliament. But I got this more
celebratory photo, which gives you an okay idea of the mood on the
street:
Imagine this, only with a flag on every car. Imagine a whole
family of five or so people, piled onto the same motorcycle, riding towards the
demonstrations by a nearby mosque. Imagine every single car on a busy city
street, honking their horns in rhythm: dahh dahh da-da-dahh, one, two,
three-and-four, over and over, all afternoon and into the wee hours of the
morning. It was pretty incredible.
More views of the extreme (relative to usual Corniche) crowdedness,
from a hotel balcony that night (keeping in mind that it's hard to know
how what it was like unless you were there and could hear the noise
too):
Now, I wouldn’t consider myself an obsessive
person, but I
definitely have obsessive tendencies, and because of that I had a hard
time not
getting angry at the outside noise that day. I tried to look at the big
picture, at the amazing moment in this city, but for whatever reason my
mind
decided that this was the time to have my inevitable Study Abroad
Freakout. “My
classes are so hard! I haven’t finished a single assignment so far! I
have to catch up, but it’s
too loud in here to get any work done, and I can’t freaking leave, so
what am I going to do?? Is every day going to be like this???" But now
that it's done, I can think objectively, and look back on it for what it
was: a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and one that I won't soon forget,
that I am thankful to have seen. Something to tell my grandchildren
about maybe. Inshallah, I'll also be able to tell them that Egypt
became/remained a stable democracy after that.
More -- on daily life in Alexandria, my classes,
the sights, cultural differences -- will come later. Thanks for reading,
in the meantime. :)
Ma' as-Salaama,
Beth C-C
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