Haggling for Socks

In Reno, I would often make pizza, homemade, from scratch. I made a fantastic red sauce and also a pretty good garlic ranch sauce. The toppings were easy to make and, of course, cheese was easy to scatter about. But the one thing that I could not master was making the pizza dough. When I made the dough, it never came out round. It was in these weird oblong bent shapes that our family referred to as tectonic plates, or continental pizza.

I remember one time that we had homemade pizza and the pizzas were so nice and round. My son, trying hard to be kind, complimented me on how beautifully round the pizza dough was this time. And I had to admit, "That's because your sister made the dough." So let's just say pizza dough is not my strength, unless you like geological landmass shapes. And who doesn't? (Well, maybe not for pizza.)

We have now gone from one geological landmass shape (let's call it Europe) to another (and why not name that one Africa). But before I tell you about that trip, I have one more Balkan mystery for you.

Okay, maybe, maybe, I could see how this means the Women's Bathroom

But in what way does this indicate a Men's Bathroom?

We left Belgrade on Thursday, super early in the morning. Syarra flew to Copenhagen and then from there back to New York, as today is the first day of her semester. Alrica and I flew to Barcelona, Spain where we had a one day layover.

Did we see amazing sites? Did we have incredible adventures? No. The reason why we lacked any noteworthy accomplishments was that I frittered away much of the day napping. After all the activity in the Balkans, the early morning awakening to get to our flight, and the journey, I was exhausted. In my defense, I could argue that I was actually becoming culturally acclimated to the Spanish tradition of siesta.

On Friday, we flew Morocco. We landed in Rabat and then took a train to Marrakech. (So here, I have to decide which spelling to use for Marrakech. In pronunciation, it is Mare-a-kesh and so maybe Marrakesh is the way to go. Certainly the spell checker wants me to use Marrakesh. The Arabic language doesn't have a "ch" sound, but it does have a "sh" sound. So to truly anglicize the name, it should be Marrakesh. But the English weren't the ones who first translated the name from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin alphabet. That was the French. And in French, the "sh" sound comes from the "ch" spelling. Think of Charlemagne or champagne or nouveau riche. That's where the Marrakech spelling comes from and that's the one you see on maps or even here in Morocco when it is written in Latin characters. So I will go with Marrakech.)

That was a massive proportion of the previous paragraph inside the parentheses. Are there rules about how much of a paragraph can be inside parentheses? Who enforces those rules? If convicted, what are the possible sentences. (Sentences! See what I did there?)

We have been to Marrakech before, when we traveled with the kids. It was almost exactly nine years ago that we came here. But it is a wonderful place. The people are very friendly to foreigners, appreciative if I know any Arabic at all (and I know only a little), and also communicative in French (which I know a bit more of than Arabic). But actually our lack of Arabic skills helped Alrica pull off a spectacular bit of haggling.

I needed socks. I left the United States with five pairs of these small black socks which are great in that they dry fast, but also being so small and thin, and me having such flat feet, I was ripping through them. After five months, I had thrown out seven of the ten socks, and I arrived in Marrakesh with one more that exposed my entire heel and would need to go. So I was really down to one pair.

We passed a man who was selling various articles of clothing on the sidewalk, you know, like you do. And one thing he had was socks. It was a pack of three pairs of similar small socks to what I already owned. He barely spoke any English, and one thing I do not know in Arabic is numbers. I did look them over once, but they are hard to remember. I can count to one: wahid. Okay, we've exhausted my knowledge. The names of the numbers are so different than any other language and so many of them are long words.

I held up the socks and asked, "Dirham?" That is the name of the Moroccan currency. And in English he said "Forty." That is about four dollars and I was going to pass on that price, so I set them down and prepared to leave. There were other places to buy socks, it wasn't a big deal. But the man didn't want to lose a sale, so he asked something that we understood to mean how much would we be willing to pay.

Alrica replied "thirty" but he didn't apparently know what "thirty" meant, so his next bid was "twenty". So I bought the socks for twenty dirham, half what I had originally been asked. Of course, if he had understood thirty, I would have paid thirty, but sometimes you get lucky. (I recognize that when he was so willing to go down to twenty, that means the socks are probably worth ten, but I'm happy with them so far.)

On another note, they do have pizza here. And it's round much like you would expect. So no one is going to hire me as a pizza chef in Marrakech. Not that I was looking for culinary employment. But it's nice to know your limits.