In the evening, Amal and I wandered to the Talaat Harb Street area. Although screens are still few and far between, we noticed one or two stores with flat screens – something I don’t remember from our previous visit a couple of years ago. Amal and I had a discussion about what we saw on the screens. In what we took to be chain stores (including a pharmacy), the screens were advertising products to be found inside the store. The screens were in the window. In the case of a cafe and a menswear store inside the Taalat Harb Mall, we saw screens inside, playing TV programming or DVDs of TV dramas. Was this because these were independent stores, and the programming was chosen by the employees to amuse themselves? Or because it is chosen by the owners as part of the social experience of shopping and for the mutual benefit of himself, his employees, and his customers?

We also stumbled across an amazing old 1930s Deco movie theater on Talaat Harb called the Metro. That made us think about how important the movies and Cairo as maker and site of moving image narratives is for understanding screens and their usage in Cairo. If it’s blackboards in Shanghai, maybe it’s the movies in Cairo?

Finally, the Talaat Harb Mall was our first mall. Pretty much as Mona Abaza discusses it. It’s circular, about 7or 8 levels, with escalators up and down, and lots of little stores (mostly clothing) on every level. Very noisy, lots of young people hanging out. Aside from their mobile screens and the screen in a cafe and a menswear store mentioned above, nothing else. We found another smaller mall before that, even more down-market, called Chemla. Very small – a rabbit warren of little shops, more like an enclosed souk than an American style mall. No screens there.

Advertisement