Rocking the casbah, and also the giant tourist bus
At 0-dark-thirty today we hopped onto a bus with a bunch of mostly other Americans mostly from our resort to take a tour of Tangier, Morocco. I wanted to step foot on African soil and get a taste of something really far away from home, and we had been told that taking a guided tour was the best way to avoid harassment while in Tangier.
Many parts of Tangier are beautiful, spectacular even. The casbah takes the quaint medieval European old-town atmosphere and ratchets it up a few dozen notches in sensory stimulation. And it is exotic, and we had wonderful food. But the guys selling crap in the streets are spectacularly oppressive. And the tour was cheesy. We expected it to be cheesy, but still I chuckled when it followed the exact script described in our guidebook, down to the "informative presentation in a sales-starved rug shop."
When the rug shop salesman I had chatted with about buying a ceramic bowl -- with whom I disagreed heartily about the appropriate price for said bowl, to whom I had told a final "no" and whose store I left empty-handed because I was about to be left behind by my tour group -- wrapped up the bowl and followed me down the street to our next tour stop (informative presentation in a spice shop) to haggle with me further about it, I felt like I had had enough bartering.
You know what? Coca-Cola in Europe has no high-fructose corn syrup. Just plain sugar. Which makes sense, of course, because corn is not subsidized and overproduced here like it is in America. I'm not sure about the Coke I had in Tangier, as I don't read Arabic.
November 14, 2007 11:17 AM
I've never been much of a haggler, myself. It's an art I never mastered, but more power to you for at least trying.
As for the Coke, there's no corn syrup in Mexico, either (I'm told), and have read in places I can't identify (or remember, really) that in some California Costco stores you can actually buy Mexican Coke.