Historical Ruins or Just Ruins?

I set off in the morning in a taxi to the National Museum and 2-3 hours later I arrived back home, safely. The beginning of he taxi ride itself was not remarkable save for that the taxi driver had a small, tropical bird perched on his shoulder. Stupid thing bites.
As we approached our destination near Midan Tahrir (the city center), the road was closed. Not unusual—Yemeni police are notoriously prone to PMS-like mood swings and traffic flows according to their whims. But then a second, and third, and fourth road were closed, so we descended from the taxi and decided to hoof 15 minutes on foot—no big deal. But there were lots and lots of police, then lots of police and army personnel. Bizarre. As we approached the Midan Tahrir, I heard faint shouting and saw military vehicles zipping about the street at unsafely high speeds; also present were a scattering of the trucks armed with anti-aircraft guns found so frequently in the Middle East. Of course, the ubiquitous crowd control tear gas and batons were in evidence.
Even more foreign was the absence of cars within the Midan Tahrir. Along the side of the square 100 people shouted, but thousands more were being held out of the circle by a flotilla of thousands of police officers (not in any way scary) and army personnel (actually kind of scary). Across the square and almost to the museum we stopped to take a photo of a pretty cylindrical building in an alleyway, turned around, and 60 people were running at us, policemen with batons close behind. After briefly considering running, we moved to the side of the alley and the group went past us. All of the men would later be arrested by this group of police. About 10 minutes later we also heard machine gun fire from the general vicinity (which we had skedaddled far away from), but no one was badly wounded.
Because this is Yemen and because I have horrid luck, the museum was, of course, shut. Utterly defeated, we decided that we were t least getting breakfast out of this one and walked about looking for an open kebab restaurant. While kebab for breakfast may sound odd, it’s a traditional breakfast in Old Sana’a and actually pretty yummy. Sitting down, we here chanting and lo and behold, up marches yet another group of men waving enormous banners, chanting anti government slogans (democratia was a frequent refrain), and sitting down in the middle of the street. No worries; this was a peaceful, well-educated group of demonstrators intent of expressing their concerns with domestic politics—no American flag burning, but rather a group of people encouraging me to take photos, explaining their grievances in a medley of Arabic, English, and impassioned hand gestures, and moving out of the way for the police cruiser. Had it been anywhere else in Yemen, they would have been armed with assault rifles, but the Sana'ais aren't quite as gun crazy as all other Yemenis or most Ameicans. Let's just say that the ruling party (whose leader has now been "elected" for over 30 years!) is growing less popular by the day.
Forty minutes later I returned to my institute having still not seen the museum, but having been present for one of Yemen’s pivotal political moments.
The next day, my very tired looking teacher described a very different scene on Zubairi Stree, complete with serious police brutality and an angry, confrontational crowd of protestors. Glad he was there for it, as part of it, even gladder I wasn’t…
My next entry will feature clubbing in Yemen. I will endeavor to answer the critical and timeless question: how sketchy can it get?