Street Vendors

Day 6
June 12th

Everything is still going well. I ventured my first snack from a street vendor—grilled corn! Delicious. I was a little wary when I first saw the carts that the vendors haul out onto the street of the medina at rush hour, around 6 pm. The carts are not very clean or sturdy looking and they roast the ears of corn over open coals, fanning them with a piece of dirty cardboard. After I bought mine, he asked if I wanted salt--of course I did--then he plunged the entire, blackened ear into a container of dirty salt water. But it was still good, burnt and salty!

I finally arranged my cell phone. I still had an international phone from France so I bought a new SIM card with Maroc Telecom. Sadly, I made some beginner's bargaining mistakes. I bought it from the first stall that I walked into and paid the full asking price. He named 50 dirhams and I was just so amazed that a SIM card could only cost $7 that I didn't even think of bargaining, especially for electronics. A fair price would have been 15 or 20 dirhams, around $2 or $3. Putain. The electronics that are available are amazing. You can find authentic ipods and iphones for about twice as much, but the fakes are the real bargain. A fake ipod video nano costs about 300 dirhams or $43. I have to wonder how well they work. You can also find any kind of fancy cell phone for the same price.

I am learning very quickly how and when to bargain. You can argue about the price anywhere where there aren't any prices listed, especially in the medina. And never, ever pay the first price that the vendor asks for! So far, I haven't had the same customer treatment as I had in Casablanca, where the shopkeeper would sit me down in the store and pull every single item off of the shelves in order to entice me. I actually made friends with Khaled, my connection in the Casablanca medina who supposedly gave me "prix d'ami" or a price for a friend and taught me some Berber words. But Casablanca's medina is much touristier. My friends and I spent a day being led on a wild goose chase through the whole medina in search of a wooden box and a pair of sequined shoes. We first ran into a shopkeeper who spoke English very well and then he just hustled us from one relative's shop to another's for a few hours. I never saw shoes that I actually liked but I did see all manner of leather goods and "magic" wooden boxes.

It is really cool to see what people hawk on the streets as well. Sunglasses, dress shirts, shoes, suits, band-aids, surgical gloves, pirated DVDs. Pirated DVDs cost about a dollar each, which is literally putting the movie theaters out of business. I can buy an entire season of Alias or 24 for mere dollars…my friend told me that Americans always go home with bags of DVDs.