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Saddled by unexpected expenses, they watch every piastre; at home, all were well-off enough to take holidays, even to Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

For generations, Egypt's government has fed the public by distributing subsidized flour to bakeries, which sell bread for as little as 5 piastres a loaf, less than one U.S. cent.

My landlord invariably gives me too little change for a piastre, and when I tell him of it, he coolly fetches the remainder.

Their pay is eighty piastres a month, with rations of bread for themselves and of barley for their animals, but the pay is often nine months in arrear, or they receive it in depreciated paper.

The Spaniards, already half-beggared, disagreed about the ransom; the bolder and the more avaricious refused to pay a piastre, the old, the timid, and the more generous preferred poverty to such a loss.