Souk Al Goma'a
People say you can find anything in this city if you know where to look. A month or two ago we decided it was time to see where Cairo’s poorest bought their best dresses and new furniture. City of the Dead itself is a Cairo Phenomena, when Israel invaded the Suez in the 1960’s thousands from Port Said fled to Cairo. They took up residence in the vast cemeteries, built by fallen empires, at the foot of the Moqattam Hills. Over time those too poor to afford housing joined them. Today, over 5 million live in the tombs, some of which are outfitted with electricity and running water.
Souk Al Goma’a (the Friday Market) is located under the overpass that cuts through City of the Dead, and every week it draws tens of thousands of Cairo's poorest residents to haggle over broken alarm clocks, homemade num-chucks, bathtubs, endangered animals, and clothes- both designer and used. Supposedly, the used stuff is stolen off the bodies of the freshly departed, and judging by the smell I’d believe it.
The market starts a little past dawn and is usually over by mid-afternoon. We arrived so early that many of the stands on the fringe were still setting up. But already the train tracks and the tables that ran across them were filling with eager shoppers. While there were stalls with items for sale, people were more than content to rummage through the unending piles of garbage that completely covered the ground. Somehow the scattered refuse became a bargain outlet for broken Nintendo controllers and phones.
The market itself is divided into sections. The tracks were just the “Junk,” and we had to fight our way in to get at the interesting antiques. We were able to find a few gramophones. The owners were more than happy to fire up the players and put on scratched records of French singers that sounded more like cats mating than the original recording. While tracing my hand along the shelves in one of the shops I grazed an ornate metal syringe, from back in the days where injections were so common a decorative syringe was a sign of prestige. The box of needles was still intact, half full of syringes waiting to be used and re-used.
Nearby Kent stumbled onto his dream find. A trophy that read “USSR-Income Sports Day 1980.” We quickly convinced him, this was something he needed to own. But, like many other places in Cairo, the shop owner truly believed a sucker is born every minute and quickly sized Kent up to be a complete chump. The owner’s opening offer was 100 LE. We didn’t even bother with bargaining.
Prices seemed to be a recurring issue for us. One shop owner attempted to sell us a used gallabeya (man dress) for 60 LE, when we could get a brand new one, that had never even touched a corpse, much less been stripped from one for 30 LE. Regardless, purchases weren’t our main objective, so the only real losers were the shop owners who were looking to make an easy buck and failed.
As we headed further into the market, it quickly became a shoulder-to-shoulder trek. You had to push to move forward, push to turn left, and so on. I couldn’t stay still for too long without attracting admirers, who made me incredibly nervous. Still, after six months in a country that loves to kick a foreigner when she’s down, throwing a few elbows felt good. At times the crowd was overwhelming, and downright physically dangerous. It wasn’t just the numbers alone; I saw a man push through a standstill crowd carrying a couple of rifles with shiny bayonets over his head.
During one intense period, while browsing old coins and bills from the former Soviet Union and Reich marks from post-WWI Weimar republic, Kent was literally crushed on top of the display table, bracing himself against a pile of sharp metal pieces with unidentifiable uses. The table almost buckled under the weight of people pushing against it. In order to shop and survive the volume of people pushing around us, Kent and another vendor built a human wall around me. It was a lot of effort just to look at a couple dollars worth of money. But I kept hoping to get a great find. Supposedly most coin sellers have two sets of coins: the ones on display, and others that were pilfered from archeological digs. Our seller only seemed to have a big stick, which he jabbed at people when the crowds’ surging that threatened to destroy his stall.
Other areas of the market were no calmer. While looking at stolen cell phones, some guy pushed violently past us, so violently we immediately knew something was wrong. He ran up to another guy and began choking him. The crowd’s response was immediate, punches were thrown and someone jumped in and beat our pushy friend with a chair.
Once the spectacle ended we accidentally headed into No-Womans-Land: the men’s fashion market. Now, I bet none of you would guess this given the rampant homophobia in this country, but Egyptian men are complete metrosexuals. The pants here are tighter than any screamo boy back home. These boys take their femme fashion seriously, and the market was frantic. Kent and Simon managed to deliver to the young Egyptian fashionistas the one thing they were missing- a foreign girl to molest. All of a sudden, as we pushed into the market, hands were everywhere. It wasn’t just the typical ass pinch. Men put hands on me like I was Jesus healing the lepers. We made this sort of Ken-Megan-Simon Sandwich to protect me as we shoved through the crowds. But it was probably the most intense experience I’ve had so far in this country, and it only lasted two minutes.
Soon enough we hit the breeding market at the back of the clothing section.
We smelt the dogs long before we saw them. As we made our way around the stacked cages and Persian cats, we came to a cement-walled enclosure. Inside, tiny cages held litters of puppies that had been bred and were being poked and prodded by their potential owners. Large dogs quite clearly with Doberman, Great Dane, and Labrador blood in them were chained to the walls. A group of idiot teens had gathered to watch, they divided their time between joking with each other and harassing a particularly vicious looking dog into a mad frenzy. Each dog was unchained one by one and paraded around the enclosure. Most of the dogs seemed pretty calm, but that didn’t stop the Egyptian men from screaming like small girls, clutching their pigtails and scattering any time they came anywhere near a dog.
The breeding pen was weird enough, but only the tip of the animal iceberg. Further under the overpass cages were packed with rabbits, ducks and chickens being examined as possible dinner by hungry Egyptians. Some of the animals were lucky enough to live in proper pens; little kids were selling the less fortunate out of plastic bags. The pigeons and parakeets gave way to cages of parrots, exotic tropical fish, and overflowing tanks of poisonous snakes.
In the surrounding cages hawks, turtles, crocodiles, hedgehogs, chinchillas and bats were all packed in and stacked one on top of the other. The animals that survived the long journey from Eastern Africa now fared poorly in the market. I once owned a chinchilla in middle school. I was a really neglectful pet owner, but my chinchilla never looked anywhere near as pathetic as these. Chinchillas can’t lick themselves clean like other rodents, they need to roll around in a fine dust to keep their coat healthy. It took me ten minutes to figure out that these animals were the South American pet I once kept. Their fur was matted down and greasy as they laid unmoving in a pile at the back of the cage. But the rodents weren’t the worst of it. Dead hawks were left to decay in the cages amongst the living. The handler divided his time between showing off his prized commodity to us, a severely depressed-looking owl and yelling at people for trying to touch the more dangerous specimens through the bars.
We had been told you could buy guns, so we made it our personal mission to figure out where. Eventually we learned the weaponry dealer and the illegal animal dealer were one and the same. So, I could’ve gone home with either a gecko or a handgun. Sadly, I didn’t want to interrupt the gecko’s fight to the death with a newt, and the vendor was out of guns. I returned from the market without any new purchases.
Still, I fervently believe, had things been different, I could’ve trained that gecko to use the gun and kept him on me at all times as an enforcer of my personal bubble. I would never need a Simon-Megan-Kent sandwich again. Imagine it.
Souk Al Goma’a (the Friday Market) is located under the overpass that cuts through City of the Dead, and every week it draws tens of thousands of Cairo's poorest residents to haggle over broken alarm clocks, homemade num-chucks, bathtubs, endangered animals, and clothes- both designer and used. Supposedly, the used stuff is stolen off the bodies of the freshly departed, and judging by the smell I’d believe it.
The market starts a little past dawn and is usually over by mid-afternoon. We arrived so early that many of the stands on the fringe were still setting up. But already the train tracks and the tables that ran across them were filling with eager shoppers. While there were stalls with items for sale, people were more than content to rummage through the unending piles of garbage that completely covered the ground. Somehow the scattered refuse became a bargain outlet for broken Nintendo controllers and phones.
The market itself is divided into sections. The tracks were just the “Junk,” and we had to fight our way in to get at the interesting antiques. We were able to find a few gramophones. The owners were more than happy to fire up the players and put on scratched records of French singers that sounded more like cats mating than the original recording. While tracing my hand along the shelves in one of the shops I grazed an ornate metal syringe, from back in the days where injections were so common a decorative syringe was a sign of prestige. The box of needles was still intact, half full of syringes waiting to be used and re-used.
Nearby Kent stumbled onto his dream find. A trophy that read “USSR-Income Sports Day 1980.” We quickly convinced him, this was something he needed to own. But, like many other places in Cairo, the shop owner truly believed a sucker is born every minute and quickly sized Kent up to be a complete chump. The owner’s opening offer was 100 LE. We didn’t even bother with bargaining.
Prices seemed to be a recurring issue for us. One shop owner attempted to sell us a used gallabeya (man dress) for 60 LE, when we could get a brand new one, that had never even touched a corpse, much less been stripped from one for 30 LE. Regardless, purchases weren’t our main objective, so the only real losers were the shop owners who were looking to make an easy buck and failed.
As we headed further into the market, it quickly became a shoulder-to-shoulder trek. You had to push to move forward, push to turn left, and so on. I couldn’t stay still for too long without attracting admirers, who made me incredibly nervous. Still, after six months in a country that loves to kick a foreigner when she’s down, throwing a few elbows felt good. At times the crowd was overwhelming, and downright physically dangerous. It wasn’t just the numbers alone; I saw a man push through a standstill crowd carrying a couple of rifles with shiny bayonets over his head.
During one intense period, while browsing old coins and bills from the former Soviet Union and Reich marks from post-WWI Weimar republic, Kent was literally crushed on top of the display table, bracing himself against a pile of sharp metal pieces with unidentifiable uses. The table almost buckled under the weight of people pushing against it. In order to shop and survive the volume of people pushing around us, Kent and another vendor built a human wall around me. It was a lot of effort just to look at a couple dollars worth of money. But I kept hoping to get a great find. Supposedly most coin sellers have two sets of coins: the ones on display, and others that were pilfered from archeological digs. Our seller only seemed to have a big stick, which he jabbed at people when the crowds’ surging that threatened to destroy his stall.
Other areas of the market were no calmer. While looking at stolen cell phones, some guy pushed violently past us, so violently we immediately knew something was wrong. He ran up to another guy and began choking him. The crowd’s response was immediate, punches were thrown and someone jumped in and beat our pushy friend with a chair.
Once the spectacle ended we accidentally headed into No-Womans-Land: the men’s fashion market. Now, I bet none of you would guess this given the rampant homophobia in this country, but Egyptian men are complete metrosexuals. The pants here are tighter than any screamo boy back home. These boys take their femme fashion seriously, and the market was frantic. Kent and Simon managed to deliver to the young Egyptian fashionistas the one thing they were missing- a foreign girl to molest. All of a sudden, as we pushed into the market, hands were everywhere. It wasn’t just the typical ass pinch. Men put hands on me like I was Jesus healing the lepers. We made this sort of Ken-Megan-Simon Sandwich to protect me as we shoved through the crowds. But it was probably the most intense experience I’ve had so far in this country, and it only lasted two minutes.
Soon enough we hit the breeding market at the back of the clothing section.
We smelt the dogs long before we saw them. As we made our way around the stacked cages and Persian cats, we came to a cement-walled enclosure. Inside, tiny cages held litters of puppies that had been bred and were being poked and prodded by their potential owners. Large dogs quite clearly with Doberman, Great Dane, and Labrador blood in them were chained to the walls. A group of idiot teens had gathered to watch, they divided their time between joking with each other and harassing a particularly vicious looking dog into a mad frenzy. Each dog was unchained one by one and paraded around the enclosure. Most of the dogs seemed pretty calm, but that didn’t stop the Egyptian men from screaming like small girls, clutching their pigtails and scattering any time they came anywhere near a dog.
The breeding pen was weird enough, but only the tip of the animal iceberg. Further under the overpass cages were packed with rabbits, ducks and chickens being examined as possible dinner by hungry Egyptians. Some of the animals were lucky enough to live in proper pens; little kids were selling the less fortunate out of plastic bags. The pigeons and parakeets gave way to cages of parrots, exotic tropical fish, and overflowing tanks of poisonous snakes.
In the surrounding cages hawks, turtles, crocodiles, hedgehogs, chinchillas and bats were all packed in and stacked one on top of the other. The animals that survived the long journey from Eastern Africa now fared poorly in the market. I once owned a chinchilla in middle school. I was a really neglectful pet owner, but my chinchilla never looked anywhere near as pathetic as these. Chinchillas can’t lick themselves clean like other rodents, they need to roll around in a fine dust to keep their coat healthy. It took me ten minutes to figure out that these animals were the South American pet I once kept. Their fur was matted down and greasy as they laid unmoving in a pile at the back of the cage. But the rodents weren’t the worst of it. Dead hawks were left to decay in the cages amongst the living. The handler divided his time between showing off his prized commodity to us, a severely depressed-looking owl and yelling at people for trying to touch the more dangerous specimens through the bars.
We had been told you could buy guns, so we made it our personal mission to figure out where. Eventually we learned the weaponry dealer and the illegal animal dealer were one and the same. So, I could’ve gone home with either a gecko or a handgun. Sadly, I didn’t want to interrupt the gecko’s fight to the death with a newt, and the vendor was out of guns. I returned from the market without any new purchases.
Still, I fervently believe, had things been different, I could’ve trained that gecko to use the gun and kept him on me at all times as an enforcer of my personal bubble. I would never need a Simon-Megan-Kent sandwich again. Imagine it.
