Manal and Alaa's bit bucket

late as usual, server suffering under the load, this aggregator thing is way too popular, will write in English since I wrote most of this in an email anyways.

On election day the youth of the movement hijacked the protest and turned it into a three hours march across downtown Cairo, we ended up with hordes of thugs attacking us at Attaba and had to withdraw to the relative safety of the journalist syndicate, everyone thought this would be the last day of protests without heavy security presence.

But it was not to be, it seems that in the no man period between the old and the new president there is no one in charge to give orders to security, hell maybe this new president guy will be better, he sure looked younger.

So we found ourselves again without security presence, but this time the protest is organized by Hamla (aka the popular campaign for change) and not Kefaya (aka the egyptian movement for change), unlike Kefaya who freak out when given a chance to take bold actions, Hamla use any opportunity they can get to raise the roof and engage in more daring tactics (after all kefaya never planned to organize any protests until hamla pressured them by taking the streets, many of the milestone protests commonly attributed to kefaia like the book fair protest and the shobra protest where actually organized by hamla), so this time everyone wanted to march, we didn't have to fight with anyone, the marching plan was still the topic of heavy debates and minor fights but thats to be expected.

(photos)

it was bigger this time, our peak must have been like 5000 we started with no more than 200 after 10 minutes of marching we where bordering 1000. we marched for 3 more hours, they brought 200 thugs this time but we managed to unite the protest in one bulk so they decided we where too big to attack anyway.

minimal fights this time, tagamuu party joined wanted to march till omar makram mosque and stay there, we had already learned the technique of playing along with their ideas till the last moment then continuing on our way.

later the elders wanted to stop at talaat harb, we played along then moved again.

all this with almost no fights, George Ishak is furious at me for slandering him, I'm being blamed for attaba, I'm not exactly the most popular person at the moment, but the radical young ones still talk to me.

Shabab flew 100 yellow balloons with kefaya written on them, the police hunted them down.

street merchants and beggars joined us and even lead the chanting, it took a few minutes to convince everyone they are not going to attack us. Bahaa cried when he saw them.

some hot heads wanted to go back to attaba to beat the bastards who attacked us, I helped convince them to cool down.

everytime we say a mubarak poster we shouted 'الحرامي اهه' (catch the thief or something like that).

that's it really, felt great, I went totally mad again, jumping up and down screaming till my lungs hurt, add this to spending the previous night and day preparing for EGLUG's installfest and you can see why I spent the next day sleeping.

went to the greek club for a couple of beers with friends. while leaving the greek saw some officers stacking the metal barricades they use to squeeze us.