Or perhaps they pinched his feet very painfully, and that's why 'the homeless guy was crying'.

(Allgar slaps himself on wrist for misplaced facetiousness)

Reminds me of Tuli Kupferberg of the second millennium music group that called itself The Fugs (Ed Sanders was the president) -- and don't you dare look them up or their song on YouTube about Bubs -- when he told the story about the barefoot hippie walking the streets of New York. When he got to the part about the hippie walking naked-footed on New York streets, he stopped, waved his hands up and down a lot, hesitated, and said, "You've got to know that that dude wasn't all there." Then they segued into one of their signature motets.

I was not trying to make an ideological point here at all. As for whether the shoes fit or not, the blond fellow was much larger than the homeless guy, and may have had larger feet. It is possible to walk around in shoes too large for you. Preferable at least to walking around barefoot on the streets of Alexandria. Anyway, as for the reasons why people are homeless in Alexandria, it cannot be analogically understood, as many on this thread seem to assume, in terms of American homelessness phenomena. Most Alexandrene homeless are not mentally ill, alcoholics, substance abusers or what have you. A huge proportion of the egyptian population lives in slums (which they have often actually built themselves, believe it or not, because the government has been too corrupt to even try project housing.) This guy could have been, for all I know, someone who'd been forced to move into the city from the slums (they aren't slums exactly, they're actually worse, but I don't know a good English word for it) or perhaps he had fallen on hard times recently (since the Arab spring tourism has dried up in Egypt and shot the tourist-dependent economy to hell) or perhaps not so recently. I don't know. I didn't feel like walking up and interviewing the fellow. Anyway, I thought it was worth pointing out that in a society like that of Egypt today, people have a lot less control over their own destinies than is often taken for granted elsewhere in the world.