Morocco: the price is a conversation, not a number
I landed thinking my French would carry me, and in most places it did. French opens plenty of doors in Morocco. It just does not open the same door as Darija.
Darija is Moroccan Arabic, and it is its own thing — fast, clipped, with French and Amazigh threaded through it. Nothing I had studied prepared my ear for it.
In the souk I got the real lesson. I asked a price in French, got a number, said no thank you, and walked. Perfectly efficient. Also, I now understand, slightly rude.
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Morocco: the price is a conversation, not a number
The next day I tried it in Darija. Salam. Bshhal? And the whole shape of the exchange changed. Tea appeared. The number moved. The conversation lasted twenty minutes and I bought nothing, and it was still a good exchange.
That is the part travellers miss. The haggling is not a fight over money, it is a short relationship with a beginning, a middle and an ending, and the price is only the record of how it went.
"La, shukran" — no, thank you — turned out to be the single most useful sentence I owned. Said warmly, it ends things with everyone's day intact.
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