My friend in Egypt has found herself—and her country—transformed by the events of the last week. She is cautiously hopeful that Mubarak will keep his word to step away from government at the end of his term in September, to reform the articles of the constitution so that the presidency will be limited, to see that parliamentary elections are legitimate (rather than reflecting only his party), and to punish those who have taken advantage of the lawlessness of the last week (though, she added, he'll have to start with the police and himself if he wants to do that).

This is the safest way. This is really a safe transition of power. I think he had a lot of pressure from America, and he has to. What he is saying is good in a political way. It means that in the next nine months the transition will be made.

I don’t know, it was so intense the last five days [starts crying].

Everything has stopped. It was so intense. Our work has stopped, everything has stopped. And Egypt, Egypt was so safe. The people has to guard all night the streets by themselves because we don’t have one policeman now in the streets, we have only army. This is harsh, and he did it. He was behind all this. We are all suspecting that he released all these prisoners to cause all this chaos.

You can’t imagine the demonstrations today. Seriously we are millions. We are walking together and chanting together and united. We [used] to make jokes about ourselves, about how passive we are, how things never change, and now I think we won’t do it anymore, because I’m not passive. And we are not bad, as we thought we are. Seriously. All people guarding our streets with baseball sticks, and they are guarding the streets all night and protecting our neighborhoods and in the mornings, people cleaning streets, and are suddenly very polite. And we don’t have any traffic anymore, and suddenly we feel this is our country and our city and we don’t have anybody to protect us. It was really positive to us. We won’t say any jokes about ourselves anymore, we feel better about ourselves. This is great. This past five days are great days. I know I sound very patriotic but what we are living is true. I’m overwhelmed...

In the speech, he didn’t sound sorry. And we don’t know what about this new government, and we are not sure if he really will not stick to his words. Our economy is really horribly affected. Tourism is our like third income and it’s really badly affected, so we don’t know really what will happen in the next phase. But for now, this is good.