It’s inevitable. Every country with a major tourism industry produces innumerable tacky and useless souvenirs that are good for nothing more than a brief reminder of where you had been before they are chucked into the deepest recesses of the long-term storage area. That, or sit on some shelve or display cabinet where it collects dust. These were things I would have bought in my early twenties, but I’m now older and wiser… just about!

Some of the more desirable and “useful” things I found in Egypt included scarves made from Egyptian cotton, perfume oils and silverware. There were also other products in the souqs that would have been attractive if you were so inclined: sheesha kits, stoneware, belly-dancing gear!

(Unfortunately,) I was very good on this trip. I hardly bought anything, but that’s more due to circumstances than any self-restrain on my part. If not for the hassling, I would have shopped more. I was very attracted by the really beautiful (both in quality and appearances) scarves and shawls that I saw almost everywhere. Silverware was also widely available - some of them were quite well designed and appeared to be of good quality. Alas, in most cases, if you wanted to shop, you really needed to spend time browsing in order to select - but that’s where problems arose.

The shopkeepers don’t believe in letting you browse in peace. They believe in following you around, literally forcing you to try their products (they would not hesitate to wrap a scarf around your head a la Arafat!) and generally hassle you to death until you finally decide to either cave in and cough up money for something you don’t really want or walk out in utter annoyance and probably anger! You can’t even stop outside the shop and look in the window because they’ll just come out and get you! And even when you do get into the shop, it takes at least a good 10 minutes, if not more, before you’d be given an answer, and not a straight one at that, to the question “how much is it?”!! So half the time, I would quickly glance at the shop and its products before making a fast strategic judgement as to whether it was worth a pit stop in return for the hassling that I know I’d eventually get.

If not for the catcalls and hassling, the souqs, or markets/bazaars, were really pleasant places to browse and walk around. They’re generally very colourful, though not always hygienic. The souq in Aswan was small (only one long road) and quaint, but it was full of flies and was very dusty. But then Aswan is a small town and a very poor one at that. I got the sense that people were a lot more desperate here than in Luxor or Cairo. The market serves more than just the tourists - there were shops selling meat and vegetables lining the market serving local customers. I don’t think we ever really found the souq in Luxor, but we did walk through one covered lane with shops selling the usual tourist fare: scarves, silverware, various stone-ware and perfume. It was the most organised and clean among the many bazaars we patronised in Egypt.

The most colourful, and yet most touristic, souq was the Khan Al-Khalili in Cairo. You’d find just about anything you would want in the Khan - from tacky Tutankhamon paper weights to Egyptian fly swatters made from bulls’ horns (which I actually wanted, but didn’t get!)! It is also probably the most efficient place to shop - it has everything you’d find elsewhere in Egypt, you can easily walk from from one shop to another comparing prices, and spend all your remaining Egyptian Pounds just before boarding your plane home. Aside from “tourist friendly” goods, there were also merchants selling food and household essentials.

I really enjoyed walking around the Khan Al-Khalili. It’s probably one of the oldest parts of Cairo and it’s a maze of very narrow paths in between very old buildings, some rather quaint. We nearly got lost at one point, but that merely led us to areas of the Khan where they sold not goods but services - little workshops for metal, leather, machinery and auto parts even! It was somewhat surreal walking in the less commercial section of the Khan - there were fewer tourists, if any, but as Chinese, we really stood out! At the same time, I think we saw more than we would have if we had kept to the well-trodden paths.

In an effort to be a little politically correct and conscious, and also as a partial reaction to the hassling in the main tourist areas, I seeked out a few “fair trade” shops listed in the Lonely Planet guide. This served several purposes: (1) there was no need to haggle, at least I didn’t think there was any expectation thereof; (2) the prices were reasonable, and not inflated because of the expectation for the haggling process; (3) the prices in these shops then served as benchmarks when shopping in the main tourist areas; (4) in theory, most of the profits derived from the sale of these goods should go to the (poor) producers - this understanding (delusion?) made me feel better about spending my money!

In addition, most of the products sold in the fair trade shops were “unique” - they were all hand-made crafts as opposed to the mass machine-produced goods sold in the souqs. The fair trade shop in Luxor (close to the McDonald’s!) had some of the nicest things. There were beautiful products made from wood, some quaint pottery and nice costume jewellery. But it was their lovely scarves made with silk-soft cotton - with designs that were unavailable in the souqs - that caught my eye.

The Lonely Planet listed several fair trade type shops in Cairo - I went to most of them, but didn’t buy anything. The craft products were nice, and reasonably priced, but they were just not the sort of stuff I would buy.

A friend had asked me to get her perfume oil, in particular, the “Lotus” scented oil. I started looking out for them in Luxor when I chanced upon a couple of shops selling perfume. Both quoted me the price of EGP150 for a bottle of 150 grammes, going down only to EGP125 after haggling, insisting that their products were “pure oil”. I later found a trader at the Citadel in Cairo who also started with EGP150 but (reluctantly) went down to EGP60 after negotiating. Walking around the shopping arcade in the Nile Hilton, later the same day, a shop quoted me EGP60 before haggling! But then, two other shops in the Nile Hilton’s arcade did quote me EGP150. I later found a merchant in Khan Al-Khalili who sold me the same for a mere EGP30!

This anecdote serves to illustrate two points: (1) unless you’re local or know a local, you wouldn’t have the faintest idea of the “fair” price for products and would only be confused by the diverging prices quoted by traders everywhere; and (2) you’re likely to be ripped off at some stage (even though you think you’ve walked away with a good deal) and you will realise it later! It makes shopping a little annoying and sometimes very aggravating. I don’t want to reduce the merchants’ margins to zero, but neither do I want to be fleeced unnecessarily. I don’t mind paying a “fair” price, if only I knew what the “fair” price was! The whole expectation for haggling and the lack of transparency in pricing can be extremely irritating.

Anyway, back to the perfumes - I eventually found out, by chance, how the Egyptians buy them. Not in shops displaying beautiful and decorative glass bottles but in shops that don’t even look like they are selling perfume. In fact, the oils come out of silver cannisters that look more like they contain hair products rather than the seductive oils you want! A good place to buy them, at reasonable “local” prices is at a shop called “Karama Perfumes“, located on the corner of Al-Azhar and Al-Muizz li-Din Allah streets at the southern edge of the Khan Al-Khalili, across from the Al-Azhar mosque. They sell scents that are reminiscent, i.e. attempted replicas, of those of international brand names (e.g. Chanel No.5, Opium, Fahrenheit etc.), but they also have oils with exotic Egyptian names like Tutankhamon, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti etc. (my favourite is Secrets of the Sahara).

We really didn’t buy much in Egypt. But then, this wasn’t meant to be a shopping holiday - for that, I go to Singapore! I picked up some perfume oils, some scarves and an Eye of Horus in silver. A got himself an Eye of Horus and an Ankh in silver. And that’s about it. The scarves (yes, I know, I can’t help but repeatedly talk about them) and the perfume oils are highly recommended buys. The silver and gold jewellery were beautiful, but only if you can bear being harassed by the shopkeepers while browsing and only if you find time off from visiting the many ancient monuments and sites that were your original, and primary, motivation for coming in the first place!

  

Posted on May 8th, 2004 by jl
Filed under: The Egypt Holiday