Bringing out the best

Walking through a crowd of a million people isn't easy, even when they are in as celebratory a mood as the crowd today in Tahrir Square.  But the reason I felt so comfortable – as rebellions all over the Middle East are bursting out – is that the past three weeks seem to have brought out the best in Egyptians.

People were invariably polite. Young men joined hands to form traffic lines. And everyone was basking in the fact, that as one young man told me, "Egypt has its dignity back."

Conga lines of youths holding one long banner over their heads in the colors of the Egyptian flag, were snaking through the square singing, "Hold your head up, we are Egyptians." Parents were holding toddlers on their shoulders, whose cheeks invariably had been painted with small stripes in the colors of the Egyptian flag. Everyone was either wearing red, black and white headbands, or wristbands, or waving flags, or wearing headscarves in flag colors.

Iyad Dawoud, 28, who presents a youth program on an independent channel called Dream TV, told me:  "this is the first time since the era of [President Gamal Abdel] Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s that people feel proud to be Egyptians."

I heard this message over and over, all day.