Many Cairo store counters were like that, empty, in the years before the country’s economic Infitaah, its Opening to global trade and import. You would enter because something curious in the window caught your eye and find inside…nothing. No food, no goods, no money. Sometimes children tending shop, sometimes only their pictures on the back wall. That was all Egypt had for sale in those days, the promise of youth, and even that quickly grew old.
©David Melody