People and their jobs in the streets

In here i present some of the random pictures and videos i have been taking of people in the streets of Alexandria. The people is what defines a country, a culture, a way of life...and the people is what i love the most in Egypt, whatever the hardships they face they still find a way to keep smiling and keep working to feed their families. I really admire their strength, they make me feel alive.

Attending to the streets...many of Alexandria´s pavements are under continuous works. The strategy of the major for improving the city is quite shocking: first call hundred hammer-men to destroy them all, and then begin redoing them little by little...so half of the city pavements are virtually war zones (major vs people). I dunno why he didnt choose the more adequate strategy of "destroy just ONE street, rebuild it and then go to the next one". Maybe he is looking for the lost treasure of Alexander the Great for financing the rest of the works...who knows? Doesnt he realise how hard is for people, specially old people, to live in such environment?. If you are disabled or on a wheel chair, you would be in serious trouble here, refrain from living in this city in 2007. In here we can see an old man watching his steps coming back from buying the bread in my still destroyed street:


But little by little pavements are done, sometimes with the old Spanish standard of one works three look, sometimes they look like most of them are actually doing something about it:

The reconstruction of the pavements is not the only work to be done in the streets, some need installation of new pipes. This guy does all the job on his own, around the corner from my house:


Apart of the people working in repairing the pavements and piping, there are many other people that work in the street. I would guess that the profession that gives more jobs in this category is transport services. There are simply sooo many taxis, sometimes a caravan of them can be seen in a yellow and black procession on the streets of Alexandria. They are more relaxed than the ones in Cairo, but still the drivers have developed a refined language using their horns for insulting each other. Certain combinations of short and long sounds refer to your mother, others to your sisters and others specially dedicated to you :D By the way, horn in Ameia (local Arabic dialect) is called clax, very similar to the Spanish claxon. Taxi drivers like in every country around the world are a very varied species, from hilarious to mad, from serious to absurd, from bullshitters to cultivated...there are all kinds in the fields of God (hay de todo en la viña del Señor).

As the buses are so few, the minivans are the life support of the transportation system here. This city extends along 30 km of the Mediterranean coast, long avenues and the tram run parallel to the sea making the transportation very easy and linear: you either go up or down...So do the minivans. There are no minivan stops of course, so another vernacular body language has been developed for knowing if the particular one you are flagging is going where you want. There are hand signals for every neighborhood: the clock, the all straight, the 5 fingers + 2 fingers, the signal of the bridge, the 5 fingers together pointing down, etc...it is tremendously efficient, and makes it easy even for an egnabi like me. In here an extract of one of my maaany minivan trips, observe how i was not kidding about the pavements:



But there is a particular type of public transportation that i found extremely charming: the tuk tuk. It is a mix between a motorcycle and the car of Mr.Bean. It does not goes very far distances, but for the wonderful price of 5 pences (in English pounds) saves you a 10 minutes walk, and with sound track :) Here we can see one in a street of Alexandria at the time of the pray:



And if you were wondering how does it feel to go on one of those, here we are...and yes is a bumpy as it looks:


In the category of public transportation i am going to include the trolley men, there are versions with and without donkey. The service they give is not to transport people, but to move stuff for a more than fair price, that television you just bought for example:

The winner of the price to the second most popular (economical) activity in the streets has to go to food vendors. I am not going to go in any depth to explain the vegetables and fruit vendors, as they are too obvious and they were covered in a previous post. But how i love to see people carefully examining the goods and negotiating:

The bread and milk sellers and delivery service, either in bamboo trolleys or simply bikes-with-stall. Why are these almost extinct in Europe?

There are sellers of baked sweet potatoes, literally with an oven on wheels (pretty much in the same style that the classic castañero). It serves the delicious and dirt cheap sweet potatoes on a newspaper, i love them.

The sellers of Al-Tarmuz in brine, altramuces in Spanish or lupin in English according to the Collins dictionary. Candy sellers, in here in a quite curious version: a guy carries a long stick with the inflated pink and white bags hanging like balloons from the top of it, and optionally blows a ridiculously loud little trumpet.

Pistachios vendors (and versions with other nuts) that walk around cafes from table to table delivering their nutritive goods. The hommos el sham stalls, that i found to be weird food. A kind of soup with floating chick peas (!!!???), i.e. como el caldo del puchero version chunga. The fool and tameia are two traditional plates that extremely popular and are sold in the streets and i throughly enjoyed many times. And of course the cochari, I love cochari! i could have never though of rice and pasta in the same dish, but it is delicious.

In the category of food and drink in the streets you cannot forget the tea and coffee delivery service. Waiters walk with their tray on their hands serving to the people in shops, to the barber, to the people waiting for the bus, anything goes. Others simply serve tea in the street, i had so many of those:

The award to the oddest job i could find in the street has to go to the guy of the merry-go-round. No engine no nothing, simply push:



Some beg in the street, obviously it does not qualify as a job, but is where they obtained their money and pass much of their time:

Others do not have to beg neither so much to do, they just sit watching the passing cars, people and time:

But by massive difference, the favourite activity of Egyptians and egnabis alike in the streets of Alexandria is to sit in cafes to talk,smoke and drink, a true paradise:

PS: these are just some of the jobs in the streets. There is the guy with scales in the middle of the pavements for telling you your weight, perfume vendors, stalls with only remote controls, the ice boy, the guy selling tapes riding a sound system on a bike, tissues sellers, books vendors carrying 20 books on their arms, the stall that recharges batteries of mobiles, children selling socks cafe by cafe, shoe polishers, the flip flop vendor, the photographer that offers you a pic, and so many others...god bless them.