Many people selling the same thing are grouped together, a fact that seems strange to my western eyes. Apparently, this is to encourage bargaining and to give the buyers the possibility to compare qualities or to be impressed by the seller who shouts the loudest or is most convincing.
A very popular tourist item is the scarabee, the little insect which in the stories of the old Egyptians was pulling the sun across the sky, and which is said to keep misfortune at bay. If all those scarabees find their way to tourist bags, the world will certainly be a happier place. It is at least better than seeing and smelling them in their natural surroundings! You may consider bring home a waterpipe instead, even though it is not an easy item to transport, or otherwise a belly dancer’s outfit, to keep the husband happy.

The man with the waterpipe is sitting in the Cafe Naguib Mahfouz, the famous writer and Nobel Prize winner, who loved this area and wrote about it in his books. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988 and his said to have visited this Cafe almost daily. Mahfouz was on the death list of some fundamentalists, and survived at least one murder attempt. He tried to modernize Arab literature and also incorporated homosexuality in his books, a fact that was not appreciated by all. Homosexuality is still illegal in Egypt and homosexuals and people with HIV/AIDS end up in prison regularly.