The thirst of approaching summer draws you toward a soft-drink advertisement covering the front of a modest shop, looking shyly onto a main street in old Hadaeq Al-Qobba. Crossing the road in search of a cold drink, you notice glass display windows on either side, holding an assortment of goods arranged carefully on parallel shelves: children’s toys, lighters, and old perfumes you may never have heard of. Among them, tiny slips of paper, barely two finger joints long, carry neatly handwritten prices in piastres.
Peeking inside, you see successive shelves and orderly wooden drawers filling the square shop and realize this is not an ordinary sweets kiosk. It is a world carrying a touch of the past, moving slowly alongside the present in an attempt to earn a necessary living. A gray-haired old man sits quietly in one corner, surrounded by boxes of sweets, snacks, and soft-drink refrigerators crowding the front. They almost erase the shop’s old interior character, announcing that the trade is taking its final steps toward extinction, and that what was known for decades as the haberdashery shop may disappear altogether.