Regular Egyptians will soon face a choice: help Mubarak or help the demonstrators?



CAIRO, Egypt -- When I arrived at Cairo's international airport on Tuesday afternoon, I had to break curfew to get downtown. Curfew was three in the afternoon, which at this time of year is exactly when the afternoon sun starts hitting the dusty buildings at an angle that makes them glow instead merely look grimy.

My driver, who offered me hashish and Doritos (in that order) yelled "foreigner!" at the army's first checkpoint, and the soldiers let us pass. For the next two minutes, we sped along at an extraordinary pace: No cars were on the road, and if we continued unobstructed it seemed like we might get downtown, and within an easy walk of the protests, in just ten minutes or so--a speed I would have thought impossible in Cairo without chartering a helicopter. Instead, an army checkpoint stopped and redirected us through a labyrinth of backstreets, with each city-block applying a form of impromptu traffic direction that reminded me of Baghdad in 2004. Neighborhood men of all ages had constructed roadblocks, and they interrogated every driver.

The first man I saw carried the type of samurai sword known as a "wakizashi," and his four friends had long metal bars, like bo staffs, which they banged on the road to make us aware of their presence, in case four men with medieval weaponry were not attention-grabbing enough on their own. They talked to me, asked if I was Egyptian, and let me go without any difficulty at all. This scene repeated itself roughly three dozen more times between Heliopolis and downtown, and the traffic wardens apologized to me nearly every time for the inconvenience. Near Al Azhar University, a man with a huge gleaming meat cleaver--probably recently purchased from the kitchenware section of Khan al Khalili market--smiled and said, "Welcome to Egypt."