Paid in riyals, spent in Cairo

Every summer Cairo receives a customer the plan does not have a line for.

The cousin who works in Riyadh. Or Jeddah, or Doha, or Dubai. Home for six weeks as the Gulf starts to empty, with a salary earned in riyals or dirhams and a summer to spend in Egyptian pounds.

A Cairo restaurant or a retail brand plans for two kinds of customer. The resident, priced for the local wallet. The tourist, priced for the hotel. The cousin is neither. They know the city, they know the prices, they know exactly what a dinner in Zamalek cost the last time they paid for one, and they are going to pay for it anyway, because the price has stopped being the point.

Watch what the summer is for. Not rest. Every dinner out is booked for eight, not two. The gifts come out of the suitcase in the first week and stay visible for the rest of it. The car that gets hired is a size bigger than the one that gets driven at home. The family sees all of it, and the family is the audience.

That is the job the money is doing. A year abroad has no witnesses. The summer is the report on it, delivered in the only currency the family reads, which is what was spent in front of them.

I have watched Cairo operators price their summer for tourists who did not come and residents who had gone to the coast, and miss the person actually at the table. The table for eight. The one paying, quietly, in a currency that turns a Cairo price into a small one.

The customer with the most to spend in Cairo this summer is on neither line of the plan. And what they are buying is not the dinner. It is a summer the family can see.