The eighteen-day uprising that started on January 25, 2011 and culminated in the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak is perhaps the most prominent example of an extended sit-in in Egyptian history. Nevertheless, Egyptians have a long history of resorting to this protest strategy, dating back to the 1970s. Extended sit-ins also featured prominently in the large wave of protests that preceded the January 2011 uprising. Despite the ubiquity of the sit-in as an important part of the protest repertoire in Egypt, and elsewhere, social movement scholars have rarely examined how the use of this form or protest affects important social movement outcomes, such as deepening ties among movement members or establishing networks. This paper draws attention to an oft-neglected dimension of extended sit-ins, namely the possibilities they allow for informal activities, such as sharing meals or exchanging experiences. Drawing on examples from Egypt, the paper highlights how participants’ involvement in informal activities shapes the group’s collective identity and contributes to subsequent contentious activism. In doing so, the paper moves beyond traditional accounts of individual acts of resistance on the one hand, and large-scale collective mobilization on the other. Instead, the paper theorizes the day-to-day, collective dynamics of contentious politics. The paper draws on a range of sources, including interviews with protest participants, chants and poems used over the course of various sit-ins, and archival material on historical cases.