I opened up my Twitter this morning and one of the first tweets I found was the following: “There have been riots in Cairo over the presidential election results:”
and the headline on the paper itself when I clicked on the follow through link was
Anger in Egypt: riots in Cairo over election results
Naturally my first thought was “OMG WHERE?” Were there riots ALL OVER CAIRO? Well, I’m 10 minutes walk from Tahrir and there were no riots in my street – small groups are in Tahrir EVERY NIGHT and will continue to be there every day and every night ad infinitum – WHY? Because democracy of sorts has come to Egypt and people are more or less free to speak their minds in public. So, listen up everyone – small groups ranting about one subject or another does not make a RIOT! Let me be totally honest and also tell you that a rabble started a fire in the HQ of Shafiq one of the Presidential Candidates – the building was unsecured and nobody there. Conflicting reports vary from “minor fire” to “building alight”
I am probably going to keep blogging about this because I get many emails enquiring about all the riots, assaults and terrible problems we are having in Egypt – so since I am now back from my wonderful holiday in Ireland – where we lock our doors every time we enter and leave our homes – as opposed to Luxor where you can see all the doors open as you walk the streets :-), I promise to keep you all up to date from here and give you some relief from the media madness!
There are no reports highlighting the fact that 99.99% of the Egyptian population are at home watching TV everynight and they are not even watching the news! Almost 50% didn’t bother to vote – that is how interested the Egyptian people are in what is happening here. But this makes very dull reading so you’re not gonna see this in the media 🙂
Just occurred to me – the Egyptian Parliament haven’t come to physically beating one another around the room as we witnessed in a European Parliament this week 🙂