A sinking feeling

It's a sinking feeling to know that your home has been attacked. I was about to head from a restaurant to Hurreya (the bar I mentioned in my previous post) not to drink but to socialize and people watch, when my roommate R gets a call, she puts her head down and starts saying, "O my gosh."

She looks up and tells us. "A bomb went off in the Khan el Khalili."

Bombs don't happen here. Not in a long time. Look through my pictures on facebook, the Khan el Khalili features prominently. We went after work almost every week the first few months I was here, I've gone there to personally shop, got lost in the alleyways, taken all my friends who have visited to see it, see the huge, old beautiful mosque there.

My stomach starts sinking and we start walking faster and faster home. Suddenly the streets that have absorbed me as a member of this society seem a bit hostile and scary, as they never have before.

We get home and read a little more. It turns out that two people in full woman's Islamic dress threw something like a hand grenade near a hotel and mosque and the market. 1 French woman is dead, French, Germans, and Egyptians are wounded (around 17 people I think). Check out NY Times, its on there.

Anyway, I went down to get ice cream to calm all our nerves and had a talk with my buddy the supermarket man. He was watching the news on TV. I could hear certain words like "bomb", "mosque", "hotel" and "America", "Iraq." The screen alternated between the throngs of people and the cordoned off areas next to Hussein mosque and ambulance lights, and the political analysts in a well-furnished room talking about why. Who the hell knows why? Evidently something about America and Iraq.

Grocery store man has a very rare stony expression. He tells me, "I'm sorry," informs me how it happened and draws me a diagram, makes sure I've called my mother to tell her I'm ok. He says he's very upset. We talked about how it was next to a mosque, how can they do that?

And the jittery feeling is starting to ware off (maybe the ice cream helped) but I am angry and I'm sad. How could people do something like that? It helps no one. People are dead, the economy (about 75% based on tourism) of Egypt will be severely hurt, and a kind of depressive fear has settled over this city, and now how will I convince all the already prejudiced people that Egypt and the Middle East are full of nice, welcoming, non-violent people. Although ya, as my friend M pointed out, much more people die in drive by shootings in Chicago probably in a month than have ever died in terrorist attacks in Egypt, that is not going to matter to the majority of people. A bomb is a bomb and somehow much scarier and much worse and much more memorable. And we have to keep on living as if it doesn't matter, kicking at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.