A fire in Garden City.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7571459.stm

Drama tonight in the city of sand! A half mile (or less) away from my apartment, the Parliament Building is engulfed in flames. At some point this evening, the 2nd story of the building (which is an old 19th century palace made out of wood with faulty wiring.... hmm... ) caught on fire, and it's now spread to the third floor. I went down the street to watch it, but couldn't see the flames, since it's mostly coming out of the back side of the building. On tv, though, it was unreal--the flames are arching out of the windows and pouring through the roof. Since I went down after the sun had set, I could only see the outline of the smoke against the dark sky. The smoke was stinging our eyes, though, and there were ashes falling. It's a trip! The traffic was gridlocked--even by Cairene standards. I mean, even the fire trucks were stuck in traffic! Apparently there's no "pull over" rule here, and even if they wanted to, the streets were so packed that no one could move. From what I understand, though, it wasn't a big problem that the firetrucks were stuck--there was a water shortage. From our apartment we could hear the helicopters overhead, which were dumping water from the Nile onto the building.
I sat at the female-friendly tea/hookah/coffee shop 2 blocks from my apartment to study Arabic and read for a while. It's not an outdoor cafe exactly, but the entire cafe is open to the street--there's no door, because there's simply not a wall along the sidewalk. So we could watch the traffic and the bystanders and the ambulances and all of that. The tvs were on and showing these really staticky images of the blaze. crazy, crazy. Right now they're attributing it to a short circuit--and for all we know, that's all it is. after all, parliament is on summer recess, so it's less likely to be politically motivated. the parliament's archives are destroyed, though, so that's an interesting part of it. We'll see what the independent news sources say in the next few days. Anyway! big news for the Garden City neighborhood.