I didn’t care much for the King Tut paperweights or the pyramids ashtrays, but I was intrigued by a stuffed camel, which, if you squeezed its hump, emitted a camel honk. When I turned it over to see where it was manufactured, I read: “Made in China.” Same with the pyramids ashtrays. So Egypt, a country where nearly half the population lived on two dollars a day and at least 12 percent of the population, and far more young people, were unemployed, found itself suddenly competing in a world where a country half a world away could make its national icons into an ashtray or a honking-humped camel,
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