Progress in Cairo no. 1

I have noticed some changes around me in the last half year. It can be from a car window as I drive down the Cairo streets or in education system or even in the metro stations. These small and sometimes big changes make me happy and give me hope that Egypt is in a healthy progress.

Im sure more changes will follow over time so I will name this post no.1. Here we go!

Illustrative photo from Internet

STREET SAFETY
In general there is much more police everywhere! Tourist police on street corners, traffic police on crossroads. Compared to 2012 when I moved here I can see a big increase. One can also spot quite a
few police wondering around bigger crowded metro stations, where on peek-times it's the survival of the fittest. Its good to know that a police officer is always close by in this crazy city of 10 million.

STREET HARRASMENT
Most days I walk to my work in Cairo Opera, its 15 min walk from my home. These last 2 years street harassment is much less than what I remember before. Less cat calls and annoying guys om street. I know some foreign ladies might disagree on this point, but this is my experience. It could be though that by now i have learned to carry myself in a certain unapporachable way (I now have the "Cairo look" in my eyes and in my body lanquage as I walk, meaning "look at me and you will regret it, talk to me and you wish you were never born"). There is another important facthor though.
Egyptian law now acknowledges street harrassment as crime and a woman is allowed to report any verbal or physical harrasmment to a police. It was inforced in June 2014. Fortunantly I havn't had much trouble, but I have heard sometimes it serves its purpose and sometimes not. If you happen to report to a decent officer, you will be taken seriously and the perpetrators will be sued. But if you happen to report to a bad one, and unfortunatly there are too many, you will not be takes seriously and sent back home.

TAHRIR SQUARE

New memorial

Tahrir Square has a compleatly new face! Reconstructed and redesigned. There is no more real square for people to gather, just a tiny central island. After the Egyptian Revolution a memorial was put up with names of people who died fighting the security forces in the near-by Mohamed Mahmoud street. Yesterday when I was heading to Gomhoreyya theatre for my performance I noticed, it has been removed! A new tower-like memorial in in the making and I quess we will learn soon what will it be!

Mogamma's new face

Mogamma (the colossal government building for paperwork like visas or licences etc) has had a face-lift, looking cleaner and brighter than ever before.
And the biggest change of all is that a large underground parking area was constructed underneath Tahrir to help clear up the square from heavy traffic and crowdedness. This brings me to my next point.

NO PARKING - ZONE
Imagine from about 2 months ago there is no parking allowed on street sided in Cairo downtown. By law it was never really allowed anyway, but it was not implemented. For some reasons this changed overnight. I will give you an idea how parking used to work in central Cairo.
Firstly let me mention that 90% of parking was illegal. You would pull aside to the street side (sometimes even the sidewalks) and a guy would approach you and lead you to the closest available parking space between other cars, you would pay him 5-10 pounds and thats it. He is an illegal parking boss who has an unofficial area that he organizez for cars taking small tips as mentioned before. The police wouldn't really bother them. Now they do! Fines are higher than ever and special forces have been added to take care of the illegally parking cars.
Its such a fast change that the city has yet not managed to reorganize it's official parking spaces. Downtown Cairo has about 5 bigger parking houses, where one can park safely for about  20 LEU per hour. But these are NO WAY enough to cater to all the hundreds of thousands of cars looking for a parking space every day. Hope the authorities manage to adjust soon!

NO STREET VENDORS
What really makes Cairo and so many other Middle-Eastern cities so excoting and vibrant are the noisy and extravagant street vendors. Once again Egyptian authorities cleaned thousnds of them away from Cairo downtown. If they didn't have official business papers, they had to leave. The streets and squares in Ataba sorund Opera Square are compleatly clean now, no stalls, no carts, no kiosks. This area looks much more bigger and open and airy than ever before. Even the traffic-flow has improved and its MUCH more quiet. Then again I feel sorry for the poor street vendors who's work has been stopped or postponed and they have to find other means of livelyhood.

EYE SCANS
This is the coolest technological progress I have seen in Cairo in the last year! Cairo Academy of Arts now has eye-scans to register employees coming and leaving work. Imagine until this day when I go to my work in Cairo Opera I have to sign my name onto a peace of paper that resamble a primary-school teacher's attendance sheet. It a common way to register working times here. The Academy of Arts has taken a MAJOUR leap and has installed eye-scans that identify each employee by scanning their eye and register their working hours because they have to scan again before they leave work. How cool is that!