Bolt Hole

Well things are really heating up now. Head of Teacher Training came into our teaching practice classes this afternoon to tell everyone that the British Council will be closing at 4pm tomorrow and Thursday (usually open till 11pm). Everyone needs to be out the building by 3.30pm. This meant yet another rejig of our already squeezed training schedules and the practice classes brought forward both days by an hour to let our trainee teachers teach the requisite number of hours on this Cambridge CELTA course. Thank goodness we have the loveliest adult students in these classes who are willing and flexible to get here at the new time. There's a definite feeling of tension in the air now. There's a whirr of helicopters in the air constantly. Taxi drivers are driving even faster than normal and horns seem louder and angrier. Just as my two colleagues and I were leaving the BC tonight, messages were coming in from mobiles that there was gunfire in Zamalek (where we stayed on previous courses in a hotel) and just a 10 min taxi ride from here. Other messages were saying that the gunfire had been heard at the Kit Kat Square, again just 20 mins away. We got home safely. I called Bb to get him back in the flat too and we all decided that ordering a home delivery of Indian food would be a good idea. The rest of the evening was spent marking assignments and watching the news bulletins on the BBC. The tighter schedule and the losing of Sunday has caused a bottleneck of assignment deadlines and so we get them in and turn them round in 24 hours! Tomorrow we need to be in school earlier to make up for the early finish and to allow trainees teaching the next day some lesson planning support time. It's all go. Bb and are I are currently due to fly out of Cairo next Monday, but we've now decided at the BC's suggestion to look at flights out sooner. Friday perhaps, which is a shame as that means no down time here after the course. We have no idea how things will pan out though and flights may become full or the airport road might get worse as it passes the Presidential Palace, which is where demonstrations are taking place - there and Tahrir Square. As I write this, President Mursi has just started to make a speech on TV. He doesn't look or sound like a man who's about to stand down.

My blip is of our living area in the flat.