Moving Targets

Saturday morning: time for breakfast and no fruit in the house. As I make a quick trip to the corner fruit stand and see a man delivering firewood, I make a mental note that winter is approaching and we should be stocking up. All thought of wood vanishes as I arrive to find a locked fruit stand. Same thing at the next fruit stand, and the next. As I wander from Sidi Ben Slimane to Riad Larous and almost to the Moussine Fountain before turning around and looping through Bab Targhzout, I realize how far we are from stores with regular hours, and cursed myself for not buying some fruit the night before from the carts that lined the street at a nearby taxi stand. Store hours are seldom posted, and when posted they’re meant more as general guidelines than any promise to be open. When we were looking for Air conditioners (at a major, high-end store in Gueliz) we saw a sign that said it opened after lunch at 3pm. When we told our taxi driver where we were going, he looked at his watch and shook his head, “but they don’t open till 3:30.” We thanked him, but assured him they opened at 3 o’clock. He smiled and dropped us off in the beating sun, where we stood until the doors were unlocked at 3:30. In the souks, the problem (or our problem, at least) is compounded. For the most part, small shops are run by one or two people. An illness or vacation means the shop closes for days or weeks at a time, and we’re left guessing when it will reopen. Virtually no shops in the medina have phones: it takes a walk to the door to see if it is open. With time, we’ve gotten better at predicting the hours of a particular store – we know better than to shop early afternoon on a Friday, for example - but it’s far from a science.

Yesterday we bought a red ceramic vase which, while beautiful, turned out not to hold water. We returned the vase to the apologetic shop owner, who promised to have one double glazed for us. This, he assured us, would definitely hold water, but it was also going to take 3 weeks. We pressed for a guarantee of three weeks. “Well, before 2007,” he hedged. “It’s artisanal work,” he offered by way of explanation. We agreed to wait, but asked if we could have a receipt, as we’d already paid for the vase. He shook his head, mildly offended. “You’ve already paid,” he told us. “You know and I know and Allah knows. That’s it.” We’re hoping that we wander back into his store in several weeks and find a watertight vase waiting for us.

As for the fruit, I’d given up and was on my way home through a back alley, when I found a man with a small pushcart laden with grapes and bananas and a little scale. I looked around the empty street with perhaps three houses on it and wondered how his clients were meant to find him.

Hypocrisies.

We’ve avoided pointing out some of the hypocrisies we find in life in Morocco for a couple reasons. For one, it seems an ungracious thing to do in the country we’ve chosen to call home. For another, it is always easier to see the hypocrisies of another culture than of one’s own, even when one’s own is an easy target like the United States. That said, it was hard not to react to the sight of a fully veiled woman – covering herself out of modesty, mind you – breast-feeding her child (no discreet towel in sight) in the middle of a busy intersection for hundreds of Moroccans and tourists to see. At least nobody saw her nose.

PS – When we posted about “Tarte Citron” we didn’t have a picture of the girl, Shaima. Well, given the fact that she has not gone away, now we do.