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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