A quick walk was enough to realize that it is not exactly the same city.
The clock was barely striking one in the morning on the first Thursday in December when cafes and restaurants on two of the busiest streets in downtown Cairo rushed to collect their chairs and tables as the last customers in Orabi Square rushed their minutes terrace ends.
In the neighboring shopping streets, it had been three hours since the colorful shop windows and the bustle of people had given way to young people wandering, early dog howls and, above all, empty and even a certain calm.
The nearby Attaba market, one of the liveliest in the country, had a similar picture.
Until recently, the main thoroughfares of downtown Cairo, a late-19th-century Parisian-style neighborhood that stands in decadent elegance as a relic of the Egyptian Belle Époque, remained vibrant well into the wee hours, especially in the summer and weekends. week.
And Attaba had deservedly earned the reputation of being a market where anything could be found, at any time.
A frenetic pace that to a greater or lesser extent was replicated in many other corners of the Egyptian capital, nicknamed - at least, until now -
the city that never sleeps
.
During the day, the area continues to be submerged in a perennial traffic jam of cars, works and people who come together to form a loaded orchestra of horns, hammer blows and shouts accompanied by the punctual calls to pray from one of its impassive mosques.
Not in vain,
Forbes
magazine
considered Cairo the most polluted city in the world in 2018. But from now on, the megalopolis will begin to rest overnight.
Faced with the threat of a new wave of coronavirus, and given the impossibility of imposing severe measures in a country with increasingly empty coffers and pockets, the Government has made good the buzz that had been running through the streets of the country for months and has set time restrictions.
From December 1, and during winter, stores and shopping centers must close at ten at night;
and bazaars, cafes and restaurants at midnight, with the possibility of extending the weekend for an hour.
In summer, they will earn one more hour.
The decision implies a profound and complex change for a hot city faithful to its nights.
In 2011, a
ranking
by the social network
Badoo,
drawn up from its data, classified Cairo as the "most 24-hour" city in the world, and noted that New Yorkers go to bed more or less when the people of Cairo get ready. to go out, in many cases to buy or share a
shisha
in a local cafe, precisely what is now being questioned.
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"Now there is still not much difference because it is winter, [but] it will be different in summer," Naser Qarab, a bookseller who has been working in Attaba for 40 years, anticipates to EL PAÍS and who, in his case, usually stays working in the summer until two or three in the morning.
The transformation could not be understood without the coronavirus.
Up to now Egypt has managed to get around - without anyone having finished explaining how - a tragedy like the Spanish one.
But in their attempt to curb the virus, the authorities decided to impose strong restrictions and a night curfew between March and June.
Cairo then experienced an unprecedented hiatus that inevitably led him to meditate again on his lifestyle.
The arrival of summer coincided with a sharp decline in infections and with the relaxation of many of the previous measures.
And while Cairo did not fully regain its former normalcy, there was hardly any sign of concern about the pandemic.
Masks soon became the exception again and crowds the norm.
The government limited wedding attendance to 300 people.
In the end, however, Egypt has not been the exception it wanted to be, and the second wave of infections, with more than 1,000 new cases registered daily by the public system, has materialized when most had turned the page.
But there is something else in the government's decision.
From the beginning, the local authorities have made no secret that the measures seek to reduce crowds in the capital, reduce inconvenience and, above all, impose discipline.
Something that the regime of Abdelfatá Al Sisi fits like a glove.
Since taking power in 2013, Al Sisi has gladly assumed the paternalism that characterizes authoritarian regimes, and with it, a deep desire to redefine society at their convenience, be it dictating how girls should use social media, what soap operas they have to see the families or, in the last one, what time the Egyptians have to go to sleep.
The pandemic has offered you the perfect pretext.
"Sitting in a cafe after ten o'clock at night is not going to report any productivity for the State," the executive spokesman, Nader Saad, admitted to the DMC chain in June.
The level of social consensus that the measure generates in Egypt is impossible to determine.
But in 2012, during the brief opening that the country experienced after the Revolution, the Government tried to impose similar hours to restaurants and shops in Cairo, claiming energy savings and order, only to end up regressing days before they came into force by the criticism from businessmen and citizens.
"Not everything is work, work and work, it is also good to have time to sit with the family," slides Qarab, the Attaba bookseller, who claims to be tired of always having to be aware of new customers.
Near Attaba, in the equally busy Jan El Jalili, a distinguished bazaar in the historic center of Cairo established in the 14th century, Ibrahim, the owner of a small local café, instead looks at the new hours with concern.
"Before the
crown
we used to work 24 hours," he tells EL PAÍS from his establishment, near the mosque and mausoleum of El Hussein, grandson of the prophet Mohamed.
The entry into force of the schedules coincided with the celebration of the birthday of El Hussein, a holiday that used to report a large flow of customers.
“For a week we were supposed to work 24 hours in two shifts, [but] we have closed at nine at night,” he explains.
"We had not seen this in previous years," he adds.
"I don't like [the schedules]," he says, "but I can't say no."
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