Relic Hunting at Khan El-khalili Bazaar
Vintage foreign items are Considered worthless in egypt Because their antiques are hundreds to thousands of years old.
A vintage postcard of a gentleman in a fez. My consolation prize from a vendor that felt bad for me.
But, once they see the spark in your eye for anything, what you want becomes an object of tension.
Having a poker face is something I’ve never seemed to master. My smile is too sweet and I’m not very aggressive with my words. Instead, I resort to other tactics, primarily walking away no matter how much I want something. This was a valuable bargaining lesson learned while living in Asia. Albeit it may have worked there, in Egypt, it was a completely different story. I lacked the local vocabulary to barter, and everyone knew if I was asking about it something, I was probably interested. It was embarrassing knowing I was getting the “foreigner tax.”
It wasn’t until I got my friend Sharif involved that things started progressing in a way that was much more enjoyable. He’s a little more aggressive and speaks Arabic. Should be a cinch, right? Not so much; we found out we had to pepper Mandarin in with our English to keep the shopkeeper at a safe linguistic distance. A cheeky game of cat and mouse with exchange rates and perceived values leading to a climax where we walk away from an item because the price they suggest is slightly offensive.
Sharif and I at the Pyramid of Khufu. He’s one of my closest friends from Shanghai, he’s family!
I was a little bit disappointed about walking away so quickly from the first place, but he encouraged me to try again at another shop. I got the second shopkeeper down to where I wanted on a brass switch and was able to walked away quite satisfied with myself. Sharif thought he could have done better, but I was glad with what I had done on my own. Besides, for what I got it for, I’m definitely not complaining!
These are called toggle light switches, more specifically, a ‘dolly light switch.’ You see a lot of them in homes between the 1890’s to 1920’s. You can still find single switches pretty regularly, just not the double ones. It wasn’t until recently that I even knew they existed!
We decided to take a break and grab a hookah and some tea. I love either mint or black tea with ten pounds of sugar in it, tends to be more on the bitter side and I can’t imagine having it any other way. On our way out, I told Sharif that I wanted to visit that first shop one last time, it was towards where we had to exit anyway. We walked in and there was no one in the store, I quickly took the opportunity to tell Sharif what things out of the group of items we first looked at that I really wanted. This way, I know I’m going to walk out of here with at least one or two things that I really loved at a good deal. There were a stack of photos, a bronze and stone ring covered in clay, and a vintage wooden shuttlecock for a loom. Just as I was picking up a camera, the dealer walked in, his face lit up.
“Found” scarab ring. It was caked in clay, this is after I cleaned it.
A deep ultramarine blue scarab nestled by tension in copper.
I put the camera down because I had asked him about it earlier, he wasn’t going to let that out of there cheaply. I would randomly pick up an item here or there, scrutinize over it, sigh and put it down. The dealer would say he would give me a fair price every time, but I just said that I’m not particularly moved by anything. That’s when Sharif stepped in and started asking about the items I originally wanted. The shuttlecock was an easy pick-up but the ring was a little more difficult. Apparently the stone was in the shape of a scarab and that it was a special rock that contained water inside of it. If you shook it, you can feel the weight of the liquid moving inside. (I’ve tried to do research on this rock and have come up empty on what it could be.) It was beat up pretty badly and dirty, so Sharif hung heavy on those points. Eventually the dealer let it go for what we wanted. Now, those stacks of vintage photos? That was a hard-core no-go, he wanted HUNDREDS of dollars for them. No way, you can keep that. After that, I was ready to split, I could tell we had run out of time with this guy and he was beginning to get slightly irritated. As we’re pulling our cash out to leave, he has one last thing he NEEDS to show us, it was some sort of “pocket timer” or stopwatch. He opened the case quickly to reveal a strange device with a counter wheel and click button start/stop. It was made of aluminum, so just by looks, it was “cheap.'“
A Pocket Camera Timer?
He mentions it’s vintage from Germany, probably left here after the wars, so not as old as the other antiques he had. He couldn’t tell us what it was exactly or how it worked, but since we were such great sports, he would give it to us at whatever price we wanted. It honestly looked like a camera timer I had back at home, and I remembered how much I paid for it. I decided that since I had to travel to Africa to get this, it should be no more than 20% of what I paid for the other timer. The dealer didn’t seem phased by my request, I figured he was giving this to us because he couldn’t get rid of it.
On the way back to the house, I did a little research. Found out it was a German auto timer for a camera shutter cable, dated around or just before the second world war. It’s in perfect working condition and its original paper instructions were tucked in underneath. Score, it’s mint! Practically priceless because it is something I can actually use, it completes some of my camera sets for sure!
Definitely pre 1945, D.R.P is Deutsches Reich Patent.
