At Somali Tera, narrow street-side stalls with grey corrugated metal doors line a freshly paved cobblestone walkway in a tidy sequence. Most of the shops are still shut, their silence broken only by the occasional opening where clothing is neatly arranged in bright, inviting layers and a shopkeeper sits waiting for passing customers. The scene sits between two rhythms: the hard, utilitarian geometry of the stalls and the slow, familiar movement of residents weaving through the neighborhood on daily errands, treating the space less like a marketplace in full swing and more like a place steadily waking up.

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