Photo: Razvan Marescu
Summer in Cairo is a sticky affair. The temperature rises with the sun, leaving a scorched city in its wake. I find it impossible to spend much time outside. Open taxi windows let in only the blistering 'breeze' rising off the Nile, and the only solace is found standing in front of your next destinations air conditioner. That’s when I know it’s time to escape.
Photo: Sarah Topol
Hopping a metered taxi (yellow cab – they are cheaper for long distances and air-conditioned!), floor it across the city to City Stars Mall, the largest mall in the region after Dubai’s monstrosities, a journey of about 45 minutes. The mega complex is everything that’s wrong and right in Egypt. The 5 floors boast a Starbucks, an H&M, a Virgin Megastore and hijabi (the Islamic women’s headscarf) shops, all in a gloriously freezing row. (And I’m not ashamed to say Starbucks has its appeal.)
Photo: Sarah Topol
Egypt is not unlike many developing countries, wrestling to absorb global culture while retaining its values. All over the city, McDonald’s serves up McFalafel, wrapped in the infamous golden arches. But City Stars is the most obvious meeting point of the two extremes: shops for veils next to Miss Sixty, no smoking signs hang above smoky ashtrays in the hallways, covered women with their families scarf down french fries at TGIFriday’s. If you squint your eyes, you could be anywhere in the world, even a mall in America, but the picture is slightly off.
Photo: Sarah Topol
The best part about City Stars (aside from the temperature) is the people watching. Cairenes wander the floors in groups or pairs. Teenage girls wearing short-shorts saunter past, batting their eyelashes at prepubescent boys, filled with the thrill of cross-gender communication. Haram (forbidden)! (But their parents are nowhere in sight...) Women whose faces are covered behind niqabs recline with friends over coffee, and Starbucks has a section for chain-smoking men, reclined with their families, exhaling next to baby strollers.
Photo: Sarah Topol
Wandering the shops, I quickly discover almost everything is out of my price range, but I’m not really there for the shopping. The mall is pristine, the fluorescent lights reflect the marble floors, (the mall is built to resemble a pyramid), and indeed it’s easy to get lost amongst the escalators, half floors, and 300+ shops.
Photo: Tark Siala
The crowd is different than the one you’ll find elsewhere in Cairo. This is the crème-de-crème of Cairo, or rather the ones with money to spend. The people you won’t see on the street because they spend their lives being ferried around by drivers from one 'exclusive' venture to another. Here you can observe them in their natural habitat, uncomfortably trying to balance Egyptian customs with Western fashion, and the tension is palpable.
Photo: Sarah Topol
The mall attracts a variety of shoppers, but since it’s not connected to the metro, most people are those with money to spend. The growing Egyptian middle-class and the spoiled rich children of the highest class can be seen loitering, taking their time to examine the maze of stores. Everyone held at least one shopping bag, and why wouldn’t you? No one is immune to gleaming consumerism, including yours truly, who eventually found meaning in the sale wrack of H&M.
CITY STARS MALL; Heliopolis, Cairo
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