this is the worst deja vu ever

Last night, a bomb went off in Cairo. Police have already arrested three suspects, although no one has claimed responsibility yet, as far as I know. I am OK, and no one I know was hurt. The place where the bomb went off, Khan el-Khaleili, is a bazaar in Old Cairo, a place where I have been a bunch of times. This one hit pretty close to home -- not literally, more in the figurative sense that I know the place and it's a part of my life here.

But really, I guess my first thought when I heard about the bomb was, "I can't believe this is happening again." During the summer of 2006 I was interning at a newspaper in Jerusalem when the fighting with Lebanon started in the north. At first, it seemed to disrupt daily life just a little -- people I knew stopped taking the bus and avoided Ben Yehudah St. for a few days, since those had been previous targets. But it soon became clear that Jerusalem was a safe place. As the north of the country got evacuated, more and more people flocked to Jerusalem; there was a consensus that even if Hezbollah's rockets could reach Jerusalem, they would not attack the city.

Eventually that summer, I had to leave Israel early because of the fighting. Obviously this incident is different; it's an isolated event and not a conflict situation. The worst part I think is that Cairo feels like such a safe city. I am comfortable walking around downtown Cairo at night in a way I was not in Evanston, where muggings were fairly frequent in the areas near campus. Yes, women get hollered or whistled at in Egypt. But no one tries to beat you and steal your purse. It's comforting, compared to other big cities in which I have lived. Something like attack makes you question that.

I have to believe that goal of this bombing, like any other terrorist action, is to disrupt people's daily lives, to make them afraid. The best thing to do is not to give them that satisfaction, to keep living your life as you normally would. And that's exactly what I'm going to do.