Dinner at La Bodega

Here's what happened after dinner:

After eating dinner with Mom, Leslie and John, we grabbed a cab and parted our separate ways. The cab took us down past the original hotel they were supposed to stay at (the Intercontinental Semiramis). All of sudden, all of the cars started turning around-- going the wrong way down a one way street. That being fairly common here, we just sat and craned our neck forward to see what was going on.

In the process of a 17 point turn (among 35 other cars trying to do the same), gangs of young Egyptian men swarmed forward from what looked like a crowd that was blocking the road ahead, all carrying baseball bat type items. They swarmed all of the cars, yelling things in the window and jumping on the hood. Our driver rolled up the windows and locked the doors, but we couldn't go anywhere becuase all of the cars in front of us were trying to turn around as well.

In the car next to us, there was a lone female woman (with her hair covered) driving. Probably 20 or so young men started yelling at her and started to hit her car with the bats. Laura and I ducked down, and kept our hands over the backs of our heads. It was terrifying. We stayed in a stalemate for what seemed like a long time, and a few young men came to our car and started yelling and hitting our windows-- luckily the taxi driver seemed to have enough, turned back around (the original way) and gassed it past the hordes attempting to block the street.

Most of the men had medical masks (presumably for tear gas) covering their mouths and noses. It was extremely scary and the closest we've been to anything like that.

Thank God we are home now.