My Second Moroccan Holiday - Day Six - Tafraout

Saturday 21st October 2023.

  Anthony enjoyed further conversation with the German/French couple across breakfast tables whilst I felt that I did not know what to say to them. It was easier for me to be more focused on the choice of foods for breakfast, the scrambled egg with Moroccan spices, several jams, honey, and tahini that were all to be eaten with the generous amounts of flat bread. 

  After breakfast the main thing we had to do was to return to the carpet shop. What should have happened before we went to to the shop was that either Anthony should have prompted me to go to the hole in the wall or I should have known to go, unprompted. But I held back partly because Anthony had reminded me much earlier that any Dirhams we got were no use outside Morocco. So, our money counted up but no more money taken from the bank, we returned to the carpet shop to look again at the choice of wall hanging that Anthony had admired yesterday. In the shop a question hung in the air, unstated until the carpet man showed us several more carpets. That question was 'Why don't you buy a carpet, Malcolm, as well as Anthony?'. I had never bought a hand made rug before. I had been given some by Anthony to furnish the house I lived in, which he liked to visit when he lived in Ireland. But me buying a new handmade rug for wall space on one of my walls had never struck me.

  The carpet that changed all that was shown to us alongside Anthony's choice from yesterday and it took about five minutes of looking at the two rugs for the decision to buy both to seem obvious. I had known I was, ummm, 'picky' about how I liked to be sold things. I disliked being induced to haggle. I liked to think of goods as being of fixed value and worth, where the choice of whether to buy or not was a formality. There was nothing much to actively negotiate. All that was required of me was to count my cash and decide if the goods were worth the price on the label. I remember feeling a certain horror at witnessing a particular open air event where a man was trying to sell bed sheets to housewives who were unused to open sales of stock that was clearly not part of any regular trade. The stall holder presented what was meant to be an auction, but instead a limited dialogue where the housewives could bid and would be acknowledged, the stall holder made his sales pitch into a horse racing style monologue where he did all the talking, where the housewife had to interrupt him talking to buy the goods they wanted at the price they thought heard. That price may not be what the commentator eventually asked for. Seeing this display of popular machismo persuaded me that if displays of hucksterism and machismo were signs of being male, then I was not male and they were not for me, ever. 

My new rug

  To return to our carpet shop, the owner presented us with an obvious, almost self selecting, pair of rugs at prices that it was silly to query, where somebody more cautious would have wanted to ask how he seemingly plucked a price for the two out of thin air. But to do that would have been to enquire about the process of his trade, profit margins and the like, that it seemed rather too much to enquire about-as if he might not be that generous towards us if we asked for his generosity to be quantified. He gave us a price, 2450 Dirhams, when sold apart they might be worth nearer 3200 Dirhams. 

  He wrote the sum 2450 out on a piece of brown wrapping paper, which he then took from my hand and stuffed out of sight between two rugs, where even if I wanted to see it again I could not find it. We paid him in a mix of Euros and Dirhams and he rolled the rugs tight, wrapped them in brown paper and parcel tape. The common exchange rate was ten Dirhams to one Euro. I would not have known what to say if I was asked to explain why I had that many Euros on me for. At the time I was in the carpet shop I was simply relieved that they were useful as a means of paying for the rugs. 

  We were out of the shop with our parcels under our arms in the late morning sun when the first people we met and recognised were the German/French couple who seemed politely pleased for us when Anthony told them of our adventures in the rug shop. He would have offered to show them his purchase, but they declined and walked toward the market.

  Putting our rugs, still tightly wrapped in brown parcel paper, in our rooms, Anthony suggest that we go for an afternoon drive along the roads around Tafraout. On the journey I mentioned to Anthony how the carpet seller had written the number we paid on a piece of paper and then discarded it. Anthony explained that his approach to money and government had to be very different to mine, his ideas about what caution was would be different to mine. Anthony said this, or words to that effect, and he knew me. But he did not know the memory I had of the open air sheet seller who sold his sheets to housewives, using a horse racing commentary to cajole cowed housewives into buying something they would normally take much longer to consider buying, and only buy when all excitement in buying was subsumed by a sense of utility, and 'family values'.

  Soon the grandeur of the scenery we were passing through quelled any further enquiry about the carpet transaction, and we returned to the primary purpose of our being there-to feel as if we were part of a landscape that opened us up without really trying. Anthony also very much enjoyed driving because the power steering of the rental car made the car easy to steer. The brakes were very sensitive and needed a much lighter touch than his old car at home, In fact the only aspect of the car where he might have been less than ideally pleased was when he sometimes did not find the right gear, as he changed gear, without looking. But the brakes were that good that not getting the right gear first time usually happened when we were driving slowly and in controlled settings, like lots of traffic, that made the mistake safer.

  We ate out in the evening. In the small town centre there was a restaurant that Anthony felt we should try. The menus were slightly difficult to interpret at first. Yet again we avoided the chicken, beef or fish based dishes. With a lot of the spiced vegetable dishes we had been served over the week there was a clean taste to them that any meaty or fishy flavours would have diluted if meat or fish was added to the veg. 

  The portions at the restaurant were huge, and quite tasty. The meal also cost surprisingly little. And from our seats we could watch life on the street, including the traffic passing and some of the handsome young men, no doubt extended members of the same family, who seemed to have nothing more to do than hang around the general stores and fresh fruit and veg stores, even when there were few customers to serve because of the time of the evening it was.

 A lot of life in Tafraout seemed to consist of waiting and watching, rather than doing anything much. We slept well that night.

Please left click here to find Day Seven of this holiday diary.