Roaring Trade

The flag sellers that have sprung up all over the place are doing a roaring trade of late. They sell for 5LE (just over 50p), but at the height of the celebrations last week they were going for 150LE.

With most people deep in prayer, noon on Fridays is a nice time to walk around the streets though once the prayers finished, the streets soon filled up again. There were so many good photographs waiting to be taken: a lone flag seller on Maadi's busiest street, two beautiful young beggar girls selling handkerchiefs, a confectionary stall where Coke costs only 1.25LE (unless you drink it then and there where it's half that!) and an old wrinkly man with the sunlight beaming off his face to name but a few.

I left my camera in the bag though, as I feel stripped of confidence at the moment. This woman was the exception, taken when it was quiet. I rushed it a little, and so the sepia effect is as much about covering up the technical inadequacies as anything else (though I do quite like it nevertheless). Just as I was about to get this woman's name (who agreed to the photo after I forked out 10LE to her tourist-savvy son for an Egyptian badge), two young men pulled up in a car...not to start hassling me, as I immediately thought, but instead to invite me to a victory celebration next week.

The tech-aware optimistically minded younger generation of Egypt have their work cut out keeping the momentum of the last three weeks going against the indoctrinated apathy of the vast majority of Egyptians. You can sense an almost desperate need to keep things moving until the reforms everybody wants begin to look like a realistic outcome.

As it stands, the banks, the stock-market and schools and unis are still closed and tourists have all but disappeared. Where the money is going to come from to start improving things is beyond me, but then that was the problem in the first place with Mubarak's regime effectively stealing it all. If anything is going to cause problems over the coming months, it'll be salaries.

And now it's all kicking off in Bahrain.

Interesting Scary times.