How Much is it Worth to You?

I recently spent a little over a week in Morocco, a country that I have wanted to visit since I was about ten. It was pretty much everything I had hoped for and anticipated, and of course a whole lot more, as one is never completely prepared for travel. We arrived in Marrakech midafternoon, and it was not nearly as hot as I had anticipated, only about 32 degrees celcius if that. Luckily the air was dry and our Riad was lovely. We had a memorable and refreshing first cup of scaldingly hot mint tea (which became an addiction), nibbled on almond cookies, and waited for the rest of our party to arrive from another part of the country. Once the whole gang was assembled and we were properly refreshed, we headed out to the infamous Marrakech Night Market held nightly in the Djemma El Fna, as it has for hundreds of years. It is one of the only world hertage sites to be purely an activity instead of a building. Nightly performances from storytellers, gypsies, roving henna artists, and monkey wranglers. It can be pretty overwhelming, especially for the stray American unaccustomed to barganing and defending your choices in dining and shopping. The food stalls are full of people with menus proclaiming to give you a life changing experience; when we finally just picked one there was applause for the salesman who finally got our group of five to take a seat.

Marrakech Night Market

The rule of life here is bargaining. Nothing has a fixed price - it is all what it is worth to you the buyer. The seller will of course begin with some outrageous fee, expecting you to at the least halve the offer if not more, assuming that their take will be somewhere around 60% of the original asking price. Many a salesman will of course try to get as much for their wares as they can, but that is no different that fixed price places in the states who mark up their wares for a larger profit. At one point in the trip the shop keeper kept lower the price for me as I kept trying to leave the store, mainly because I didn't have any bills small enough to bargain with. I never want to bargain hard for something cheap, then hand over large bills expecting change. It just makes it all feel so trivial, especially when you factor in the exchange rate. (The dirham was 1/8 the worth of the US dollar at the time we were there.)  You can find real deals everywhere, but you can also see the human touch in everything. There is hand painting, carving, weaving, guilding, on everything. From stair risers to ceiling beams, there is nothing mass produced. Even the daily orange juice is fresh squeezed. We saw no McDonalds or Starbucks; the most commercialized products we saw were bottled water and yoghurt. Everything changed when we got back into Europe. It was sad to leave a place that puts such a high value on craftsmen and individual attention to detail instead of cheaply made, mass produced generic wares.

 Morocco felt like a very personal country, where everyone wants to hear your story, and if you by something all the better, but they at least want to talk with you. They really see the human as an individual of worth instead of just another customer - which is not necessarily what you would expect entering in to a bargaining culture. The offer of a cup of tea is not a scam to get you to buy more. They have been operating in the arena of cross cultural communication for centuries, and its high time we in the west trust a little in the decency of human beings. Everywhere we went shopkeepers proudly discussed the great things Morocco has to offer, lamenting the lack of tourism and the brain drain they have for the upper crust of educated society. You get the sense that this is a country of people with lots to offer but still trying to find ways to market it to an arab afraid western world. So in the end, how much is that rug, or platter, or scarf really worth? Worth the hassel of bargaining to get a fair price, knowing that your piece is very likely the only one exactly like it, or worth the convience of not bargaining to get a mass produced clone? How much is the livelihood of a master artesan worth? Or the continuation of centuries of tradition?

Into the Great Unknown, Again

Tomorrow morning we leave for a month - well, 24 days, but whose really counting - in Europe and North Africa. Travel is definately a bug that I caught young, and its something that I can't quite explain how. We never went anywhere far flung on family vacations, usually because we couldn't afford it either financially or time wise. I was always the kid reading the folk tales from far off places instead of contemporary childrens fiction, which in the '90s was dominated by Goosbumps and Sweet Valley High. Since my first trip abroad in 1998, this will be my seventh international flight to three new countries.  Once I get back from a trip, the wanderlust is sated for maybe a month, and then I'll be already idly planning the next trip. It has become a matter of pride in a way, being able to refute others misinformed comments about the world at large and point out where their own cultural biases lay. Anything from belief in elves in Iceland (you can't prove that they don't exist!) to Ethiopian Orthodox fasting, which for the devout totals 250 days a year, the world is full of diverse practices and beliefs, and it would be beneficial for us to be exposed to these different ways of seeing. It encourages you to reevaluate all that you deems as natural and inalienable and see just how much we take for granted.





Gilbert Chesterton

There are many great and inspiring quotes on the web about travel, but one that seems to speak to me is by the English writer Gilbert Chesterton: "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land." How true it is that something a simple as a free potable drinking fountain can be overlooked on your way out of the country and rejoiced over on your way back in. To see the land you live in a little differently, not as an outsider persay but to see how the rest of the world sees you. It seems like as one from the United States we always expect the worst from the rest of the world, and are fittingly not surprised when a dictator comes to power or an internal sect of people are oppressed.  The rest of the world, on the other hand, expects the best from the US and are disappointed when we fail to meet the high expectations, such as the debacle that is Iraq post-Hussein, or Guantanemo - the infamous black stain on our human rights record.

We were in Egypt in February 2009, just after the inaguration of Barack Obama. Everywhere we went people would ask us questions about politics trying to get a feel for how our new president was viewed in country, as they clearly had disdane for the previous one.  They would ask questions about Sen. McCain, and would tell us how happy they were that Obama won the election and that Americans had come to visit and that not all muslims are terrorists. They had this sense of renewed hope in the United States, like we had been knocked down in their esteem and had now been catapulted back into the stratosphere. When we asked questions back about how they felt about their president, Hosni Mubarak, they had an enigmatical answer - he doesn't make war and we like that. If the best you can say about your leader is that he doesn't provoke the neighboring countries, there are clearly some other issues afoot.

This impending trip promises a whole new lot of surprises and memorable experiences. I, for one, hope to see goats in trees, and drink copious amount of mint tea.  I'm tempted to go to a hammam, but so far no takers in the group and I don't want to go alone. We've been planning this trip for almost nine months, so keeping my expectations at bay has been tricky. Nothing is worse that spending all that time and money to be thoroughly disappointed due to your own overshot expectations. That's how Venice was for me the first time. On the second go around, because my experience had sunk it so low, I had a wonderful time. So we'll see. Let the latest journey begin!