Thursday, December 28, 2006

The Cell Phone Souk

In the old days, Egyptians went to the souk (market) to buy and trade camels, now they go to the souk to buy and trade cell phones. Yesterday we went to Sharia Abdul Azeez and it was the craziest thing I had ever seen. There were about 50 stores on each side of the street selling new and used cell phones and there were also thousands of people in the middle of the street selling, trading, and buying cell phones. Basically, if you are tired of your current cell phone (which you have probably only had for a month) you go stand on this street and hold up your phone and wait for interested buyers. New cell phones come out every day here and they go out of fashion just as fast. Hamdy's sisters had motorola rasers (sp?) in the summer and now they have Nokia 9300 and imate pocket PCs! How the average Egyptian, with a monthly salary of about 400-500 LE ($80-100) can afford to buy cell phones for 1000-2000 LE is beyond me!

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