Rashīd Street in downtown Baghdad is the heart of this area and contains the city's financial district, many government buildings, and the copper, textile, and gold bazaars.
A spike in the price of gold in the Tehran bazaar recently forced the government to intervene.
"It will ruin our life," said Shougoufa, 40, as she sorted through sequins and gold sparkles at the bazaar in the city of Pul-i-Khumri in Afghanistan's north.
Unrest in currency markets coincided with a strike by gold traders at the Tehran bazaar and in a number of cities across the country in reaction to plans to introduce a 3 percent tax on gold transactions.
Waiting in line at a crowded gold bullion shop in Zaverri Bazaar, student Pratik Shah says: "I'm buying these coins as an investment for my future, when I want to start a business or something like that.
At the bazaar we bought some gold trinkets (about $25 each) and after returning to Istanbul we discovered that one was missing (which we easily replaced at the Grand Bazaar).
A strike that began last week at the gold and textile sections of the bazaar in Tehran as a protest against a government plan to increase the income tax on merchants grew on Tuesday to other sections, according to the Web site Khabar Online.
On the other hand, the "antique" figurines that the lads buy in the bazaar look suspiciously like the gold sarcophagus of Tutankhamun, only discovered by Howard Carter in 1922.
Concluding the evening with a bang -- and a snarl and arched eyebrow -- "Model Behavior, i.e., the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" demonstrates why Theatre Movement Bazaar is heralded as a gold standard in the peculiar genre of wry literary remakes.
In my role as chief of counter-terrorism in the Interior Ministry of Turkey until 2013, I monitored money exchange offices and gold shops in Gaziantep, Turkey and the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul due to the fact that they sent and transferred cash assets between Turkey and the Islamic State and from Turkey to the rest of the World.
